
Back before I blogged, I home-paged. Oh yes I was Internet-savvy back in the 90s. I created my first home page towards the end of 1997. And back then, there weren’t any fancy blogging software to use. It was all lovingly hand-coded in HTML. CSS hadn’t even come into the picture yet. And for the more tech savvy among my readers, some parts don’t render well in Firefox. Not my fault, Firefox was not available then and I wasn’t using Netscape at all. So I was coding for IE and all its quirks.
Here’s the link to a copy of that site which was last updated in May 2000. If you have followed my blog since a while back, you’d realised that I’ve “repackaged” some writings from that old home page onto the blog.
Looking at some parts of it now tends to make me cringe, especially the poetry section. Wtf was I thinking. Heheh. But the site was most definitely the genesis of my blogging habit now. Even though I didn’t really pick up blogging, ie. writing on the web again until the end of May 2005.

And speaking of hand-coding home pages, did you know that Karen Cheng’s blog is also hand-coded? That’s right, she doesn’t use any blogging software. This feat is impressive though I’d imagine it to be quite tedious. Everytime that she adds a new post, she has to presumably edit the “index.html” page and also the monthly archives page.
It’s a labour of love indeed. And although it lacks the typical functions of a modern blog such as permalinks, trackbacks, comments and RSS it’s a very beautifully designed site. I salute you Karen! ![]()
15 Responses to “Home pages, how quiant”
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OMG I so remember having my own website,a couple even…I don’t remember where it is though…I even graduated to coding in macromedia in 2002. Alas, that love affair ended when I realized I can’t be bothered to hand-code and half my links were broken.
I love that poem and musings section…(run away laughing)..but thats just because I have the same thing on mine in a past life!!!
HAhahaha…corny morny
oh…..didn’t know you can be so poetic
Mooi….. yeah .. i rmbr doing my website in college. Darn was some kinda project. And gee i was in engineering.. wat was i doing web homepage anyway… hahaha.. and i have no clue where the heck is it anyway.
those were the good old days of the 90s. Gee it felt so long ago… 10yrs must be. I was there in 95 when we were still browsing wif Mosaic and . … doing the FINGER thingy on telnet…. duhhhhhh
anyway i dun blog and i suck at this webby thing.
moOooo mOOoo~~~
sourrain: heh. ah, memories.
JJJ: I tried to be, or I thought I could be. Either way, I’m not. Hahah!
dsnake: those were the days.
Ang Gu Gu: erm, ok then.
waahahahaha… i hv my own webpage too. i even bought some corny domain name and a yahoo webspace for it. how so ‘retro’ of us
this is really impressive, another point, her son is cute!!
Wow! Karen really had a nice site.
I used to have one in geocities too. Learn html code all by myself. So keng chao liao for someone IT illiterate like me.
Go view them la. http://www.geocities.com/siewjang/mypage.html
If you look at her page source …
It’s so neat man.
her site is definitely one of the best..
everything is done so nicely..
not that yours is any worse of it marcus…
Lara: it’s nice reminiscing isn’t it?
Leonard: yeah, mixed blood. That’s why.
Hijackqueen: oh yes, her site is very well done. And your site is not too shabby at all.
Herman: yes she definitely takes pride in her work.
damion: haha, well I have it easy. She codes hers from scratch.
same here! i used to code in html back in 1997. self taught by going through other people’s websites and looking at their source!
i actually enjoyed it. i will search for my old site now………
dreymer: hahah that’s how I did it too. I had even printed out one of those basic HTML references. Hope you find your old site. If you can download a copy of it, even better. It’s a great time capsule.
mooiness: found it http://missbliss.tripod.com/main.html
why missbliss? that was my nick back in those mIRC days. i even created those icons from scratch. i love my work.. too bad it was too time consuming and to update was such a drag. plus digicams were non-existent at that time. all my photos were hard copies and i didn’t have a scanner
dreymer: woohoo! Yeah updating those sites were a pain. And I hear you about the photos. I can’t even imagine not being able to take and upload photos just *like that*.