Twenty-Five-ish Years of Personal Websites
The current site is the fourth or fifth incarnation of my personal web presence, depending on how you count. The technical history of this iteration lives elsewhere. This is the longer story — the one that starts in 1996.
way.nu — The Personal Homepage Era (~1996-2000)
Before there was blogging, there was just… a page about yourself. Mine was “So much Tee-Vee, so little time.” TV static background. White text. I originally built it in Netscape 4’s crappy web editor and customized from there. Originally it was a bio page that everyone working at CNN.com had on a hidden side section of the site. Eventually I grabbed it and threw A PATCHY web server, GET IT??? on a dedicated server I shared with a friend so I could have my own way.nu email address. A bio timeline table, with links to a few long-form posts, a search widget, I don’t think I ever had an under construction img, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I’m sure I had a visit counter. A link to my email disguised in JavaScript to foil the nascent spam bots - those were the days. I spun up several MySpace pages - less said there, the better.
The meta description I wrote for it: “Probably a complete waste of your time, unless you’re looking for a been there, done that internet strategy consultant.” I stand by that energy.
The Blogger Era - Postcards from my Head (~1997–2002)
Eventually I tossed the 1st page and replaced it with a very gray blog - Postcards from my Head, HTML essays. No CMS, no comments, no RSS — just files. The subheader: “Everyone else has a rants page, why can’t I?”. I can’t remember whose layout I swiped, but the all grey was all me. Blogger had come out and I was using it to ftp new pages to my website. The UI was done by server side includes, which I thought were very swank as I got a consistent UI that could easily be changed.
Content was mostly fairly long, techie opinion stuff. Mostly cribbed from various mailing lists which were the nascent communities of the internet. I wanted to be the Hunter S. Thompson of tech blogging - “My Ass is a Portal”, “Grenades and Engineers,” “The Myth of the Long Boom,” “The NEXT Insanely Great Thing,” and “The Medianet — Forces influencing the evolution of the internet.”
The blogroll was your tribe - I was a VERY early signatory of the Cluetrain Manifesto, so RageBoy, Doc Searls, were there, Boing Boing, Philip Greenspun, Michael Sippey. That publicly declared reading list that said as much about you as anything you wrote.
way.nu — The Movable Type Era (2002–~2005)
Eventually I got a proper blog. Movable Type, running at the domain root. The tagline: “Jonathan Peterson’s musings on technology, captivation marketing, net.culture and other ephemera.” Blogs were spinning up new tech FAST, so I had geocoding, trackback pings (and spam),FOAF, an RSS feed (who remembers the RSS Format wars??, huh?). Links opened in new windows as was the fashion at the time, like onions in our belts.
“Captivation engineering” was my coinage for the practice of designing digital experiences that earned sustained attention — the thing I spent most of the aughts doing professionally. I wish I’d thought of Minimum Lovable Product, but you get it. The blog was where I worked that out in public.
Lots of opinions about emergent tech democracy and the coming collision between blogs and broadcast media (“No news organization can afford to be out-factchecked by amateurs” - how wrong THAT was). We really thought blogs were democratizing the media, that more voices would be great and that tech would take the world. It’s the hope that kills ya.
jonathan-peterson.com — The WordPress Era (~2008–2011)
The Nuie .nu domain registrar jacked their prices up, so I ended up moving to jonathan-peterson.com, and moved to newer hotness, WordPress: “Not Just another WordPress weblog — it’s MY WordPress weblog.”
I was in full tech magpie mode, new web apps launched all the time, new technologies and I just braindumped - OSX automation with cron and AppleScript, early takes on Google+, tools for publishing on iPad. This was the era of writing about the mobile web while not quite knowing what the mobile web was going to become. Trackbacks and local comments were too spam-ridden to deal with, so a lot of us moved to Disqus (which somehow still exists?)
The Gap - Social Media
Somewhere in there I lost the server and restoring my backups required a specific older combination of MySQL, PHP and WordPress - and I just didn’t have it in me to rebuild. I had Facebook, and Twitter, Tumblr (mine has been around 18 years!). None of it was a personal site in any meaningful sense. The domain name was redirected to a WordPress portfolio site and then my LinkedIn Profile
The current site is the result of actually sitting down and rebuilding it properly, which has its own story. The goal this time is something that lasts longer than the previous iterations, is lightweight and static and doesn’t require fighting the platform to write a post.
Screenshots were captured via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you have a screenshot of your own 90s or early aughts personal page, I want to see it.