Skirv's Homepage - A History

Note that this is merely draft one of this page - as are all things on my web site. But it's not "under construction", at least...

The web was always near and dear the heart of my high school. After all, NCSA Mosaic was created just down the street from us, ushering in the modern world (or so the my more melodramatic techie friends would tell you). My first experiences were with the lynx web browser, followed shortly thereafter by playing with Mosaic itself on our DecStation Alpha (and getting chased off shortly thereafter for slowing down everybody's news reading). It didn't take long for me to decide to learn HTML by stealing it from others... and so I put up my own page early in the process, learning the art by doing.

Well, that is, if you could call it art.

It's hard to explain the early history of my pages, simply because I didn't keep very good track at the time. The earliest versions of my web page that I can find are dated 14 Apr 1995 and 09 Aug 1995. The former is probably my first web page, and I suppose I can consider its creation the official birth date of my web page (though it was likely created slightly earlier than this). The latter is the first time I've got an official record of the Dungeon. Both are unpolished, ugly, and very sterotypically me. I love them like children. But within that time, things are spotty.

Personal Pages

My main page, as stated above, began in 1995. It has gone through many permutations through the years, but has always followed a few guiding principles: be complete, no lies, text is better than pictures any day, I'm trying to teach, make it accessible, and never remove anything unless it's no longer necessary. These are still the principles I live by with this page. And now it's one of the longest content-filled pages in the world... I recently (Jan 2003) added in an RSS feed for announcing regular updates, and I've been quite happy with it.

The first draft of my Friends Page came in 1996 or so, when I finally had enough friends to make it worthwhile. It has always been in generally its current form - a long list of people with a few pictures and more information than I should rightfully give out. It's currently database-backed, but really it's not that complex. I still like it a whole lot.

While I've been wearing Buttons since around Aug 1995, I only started keeping track of my buttons on the web in 2002. It's been a fun page to maintain, though. I worked out the "make an HTML table to recreate the buttons in" trick in January 2003.

My Philosophy page has existed in a similar form to its current one for about three years now, though I rewrote the content on that page dozens of times during that time. It seems okay now, though.

My LiveJournal will have its own page.

There's not much to say about my Bookmarks file, save that I should have been sharing it for a lot longer than just late 2002.

Having resisted for years, in July 2002 I finally bought a digital camera and started taking lots of Pictures of things that I wanted to take care of. This page went up that same month, and has been actually quite useful.

Archive Pages

The Current Life was created in early 2002 in response to a general desire to, well, make lists - much like I specifically said I wasn't going to do when I first started my web page back in 1995. But I still wanted to list off for myself what books I read, what movies I was watching, what I was generally doing... And so I did. It's actually been an interesting page to maintain, but it also seems like something that I may drop some day.

The History pages are an artifact of the end of college, in 1999-2000. Upset with myself for losing what I cared the most about in the world, Allen Hall and the people in it, I decided to start transcribing things. My first attempt just listed off all of the things that I thought would be easy to write about; after not writing about most of them, though, the page began to stagnate. Then in 2002, after a bad breakup, I came across the idea of using some code I had from work to self-index the pages - and so I started over. The new page seems to work much better, and while I'm not writing pages at the rate that I'd like to write, it's still growing. Perhaps some day this page will be as great as I'd like it to be.

The Posts page was something I had been meaning to do for years, but just finally got around to in June 2002. The real question has been that of letting it be searched by web crawlers, since people get really touchy about their posts getting caught by spam spiders. And so it's somewhat resticted...

My Cows page was created in January 2002, and has always consisted entirely of ASCII cows. There's not much to say about it. It's a labor of love and silliness only.

I have always considered my Quotes Page a supreme disappointment. I just don't have the right knack for writing down the right quotes; the things that are funny to me when I hear them are rarely funny later on. But it's old (circa 1996) so I keep it around...

I began the Threats Page in 1995 after the first threats started flowing in concerning me. It was always meant as a deterrent to both myself and anybody that would threaten me - I have no compunctions about telling others about such things. It's not often updated, but it's still useful.

The Certificates page is nothing special, just a place for me to put random stuff on. It's a combination of several other, smaller pages from before, though, which is still an improvement. I created it in its current form in 2002.

My Documents page was always a point of pride for me - these were things written about me or primarily concerning me that I actually cared about. I created it back in 1995 as well, and while it's rarely been updated since, it really hasn't needed to be. The advent of DejaNews and Google Groups have helped to make it irrelevant anyway...

The Story page was the first real subsection of my web page, created as I was writing short pieces of fiction for myself on the unihigh.* newsgroups. In retrospect, this stuff wasn't all that bad - hell, I actively like my Star Control II fanfic. Not much - hell, any - new content has appeared there since 1995, but I still happily maintain it.

I've had the Vanity Page since about 1998, but never really used it much until recently - that is, it wasn't linked until 2002. In its current form it's a nice place to put the things I like to hear about me, if for no other reasons than to a) acknowledge that I heard it and b) make sure that they won't be lost if the site goes down.

With the Daemons

The Dungeon was actually begun on 13 Apr 1995, and was only the second real subsection of my page. This page

The Spirit of Christmas has its own history page, so I won't get into it here in great detail. It was very popular for a while, receiving up to 6000 hits/day in its era. If only I'd gotten a banner ad up back then... We recently remodeled it with more scripts in late 2002, and it's generally been in better shape ever since.

I also at one point maintained a page about South Park with the Daemons. It was actually quite popular, but also took a lot of bandwidth and had to move around quite a bit.

Meta-History

My web page started out at my high school web server, until I put up my own web server at arh0062.urh.uiuc.edu for my freshman year. When this went down, the files moved to first the UIUC College of Engineering web pages, and then to the Math Department, where they remained for a long time. After the success of soxmas.mov, though, I grew weary of not having full control of my own files, so I decided to put the files onto dannyland.org, a domain run by my friend Dannyman. This lasted until his machine died, which finally prompted me to create killfile.org and move all the files here. They have lived here ever since.

Note that this was the short version of the meta-history. The long version isn't much more entertaining.