Decade Part One, Domain

Ten years ago, I had a website.

I find it vaguely amusing that for the first few years of the site’s existence, I have copies of the entire site. One such is for January 1999.

I was running a monthly newsletter called “Grey Areas”, created as a fansite for Lionhead Games’ forthcoming genre-changing wonder, Black & White. I was also running “Follow That Game” a kind of multi-game fansite for the five games I was most interested in at the time. At the time that snapshot was created, those games were Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuri, Black and White, Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun, Simcity 3000 and Quake III.

Every single one of those games was released and generated at least one sequel, although SC3000 changed quite a bit before it was actually released.

In the archived site, the front page is just a jump page to several subsites, including a photo tour of my bedroom, and a record of which bits were updated. This is ten years ago, I’m in the process of screwing up my last year of my A-Levels. I’m involved in usenet a bit, but not as much as I will be really quite soon. The site was hosted on netmanor.com. Within a couple of months, the image-based side navigation would be replaced by a javascript include so I only had to update it from one place. Soon after that I went to university, and started putting a little more personal stuff into the front page updates.

Between Christmas and New Year 1999, I was attempting to come to terms with the whole “end of the millennium” thing, beyond the “It actually starts next year” refrain, I wanted to start something with the new millennium, mostly to see if I could.

So, ten years ago today, I signed up with “Pennyhost” for pretty much their cheapest hosting service, which came with a dot.com. I wasn’t really expecting them to do anything about it until they got back into the office in the new year, but the domain was registered automatically, all I had to do was upload my site.

So I did, and what was “Aquarion: The Website” became what it is now, less the Exocet font I was so attached to back then.

Aquarionics.com.