Webspace and Me: A History

The move to Wordpress is a major landmark in my experience of creating my presence on the internet; it is the first time in my 9 years of having my own site that I have paid for hosting. To mark the occasion I wanted to create a timeline to show the progression of the sites I've created, plus I've never cataloged this so I though it would be interesting for me if not for anyone else.

I want to say it began in 1998 when we first got the internet at home. We had aol and you could make your own website, I don't really remember it.

From that I moved on to the free hosting site tripod.com. I never made a personal site there, instead I made a site to list the complete discographies of every band that I liked, with tracklistings. In the early 2000s I made the first ever (and as far as I know, still the only) fan site for Blake Hazard. You can get a very broken glimpse of it via the Way Back Machine archive take a look. Oh and then there was a site I made to educate people on the different ways "indie" music can be defined. I was quite the indie snob.

At the same time I started having a blog, I used livejournal, and xanga, and livejournal again, and again.

Which reminds me of something I've missed from livejournal and can do now...
Ah the "more" code, like the lj-cut that never ends, unless there is a way to end it and I just don't know yet. It's a nice transition anyway.

Due to my frustration with the limitations of tripod's sitebuilder, I started learning some html and even some javascript. In 2003 I made a site for my college's student run web radio station WKGC World Wide. I was fascinated with a script for absolute-positioned scrollable divs. That's also about the time I really got into having my own site.


My first domain name was FarewellToTomorrow.net (there's nothing there now), I would still own that domain had my registrar (namecheap) not cheated me out of it.
This site was hosted by comcast at times, but was also hosted for a time on my own PC, a fact to be very proud of in the geek world. FarewellToTomorrow is still something special to me, it was a time when I was really into coding my own pages and my content there is something I aspire to now. I was proud of myself for making a piece of javascript to make two positioned divs in different places on the page toggle visible or not by clicks or mouseovers of separate links. Kind of hard to explain but there was no script like it at the time.
The content consisted of poems or lyrics I had written, mostly spiritual exhortations with scripture references and sometimes a "thought" page to explain. I would really like to be able to do this sort of writing again, but it's as if it has left me. You know I say that and I know it's really because I'm not trying, I've been playing the escapist with God for a while and I need to knock it off; this used to be the sort of thing I would post about and maybe I will do just that. Here's a banner I made, I was also really getting into Photoshop at the time.


I even learned some flash for one of the layouts I had. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the internet archives did not archive this site. Fortunately, I have most (some was lost, I cried, seriously) of the content and two complete site designs saved for sentimental purposes, plus it will be quite invaluable once I'm famous.

I had that site for a couple years and when I could no longer have the domain name I bought selah-everyday.net (nothing there anymore either). I was hoping it would be the same kind of thing, but it wasn't. It was also my first site using blogger, which I liked and hated at the same time. Less time consuming, but more generic. And getting things to work was a beast. I'm glad I never have to see that "taking to long to publish, click here to continue trying" message again.

Something about the name selah-everyday I never really fell in love with and my content hardly ever fit what the name implied, so when it expired I bought OhBuoyancy.net (you're there now!). It's a name with multiple meanings, and it makes people go "ha!" It was blogger, now it's Wordpress. It was hosted on comcast, now it's hosted on ASmallOrange. It feels liberated!

I had wanted to have a Wordpress blog for a few years actually, I had searched for good, affordable hosting many times. I almost when with wordpress.com, but I didn't want to have to pay to edit my css. Then David (Sketchism) pointed out some cheap hosting to me, and while I ended up not going with that host (after 36 hours I gave up on them answering my "within 24 hours" email—which they still haven't answered), it got my mind set on having paid hosting and I found ASO to be highly recommended and also very affordable.

And there you have it (or there I have it because I doubt anyone else will actually read this mammoth of a post).

This was fun anyway. It's so weird to go back and see some of the things I used to write about and how much I've changed and things in my life have changed since.

(You know I don't think I have ever used parenthesis this much in one document in my life.)