Club Admiralty

I think the alpha versions of this site didn't have much - they weren't even on the web itself! One day I walked into the office of the director of computing at my high school looking for the computer club, and I was given a CD with instructions on how to code HTML 2, as well as Netscape Navigator 3.x for my 68k Performa, and a few other programs (I think a gopher client, an ftp client?) that I never used. So, I started marking up some text in HTML, using headers, paragraphs, lists, and the all impressive BLINK tag. Of course the problem wasn't the coding - it was the content. What should I create? And, why does it look so plain, when in comparison Microsoft Works had so many formatting options?

When I started college I spent a lot of time at the computer lab. This is when Yahoo Messenger was first out, Java-based anything were all the rage, and free online hosting via sites like Geocities and Angelfire. With my friends also heading off to college, and no new physical addresses for snail mail, I thought that an opportunity for experimentation was again available. I created a geocities account and started playing around. I dusted off my HTML skills, picked a neighborhood, and started creating pages. If I remember correctly club-admiralty was parked at geocities.com/Area51/Matrix/#### (Area 51 being the Sci-Fi neighborhood). I don't remember my number. I wanted to pick 8472 (for species 8472, from Star Trek Voyager), but that wasn't available. Funny thing is that a year after I joined geocities Yahoo bought them out. Eventually the URL became geocities.com/username.

So, what did my geocities site include? Well, at first it was the digital equivalent of two printed pages stapled together. One in Greek, one in English. Both had the same content, which was a brief, montly, update on how things were at college. How classes were going, what courses I was taking, and general "AHA!" moments. Think of this as a proto-blog. Sadly, each month I just deleted the old text, and added new stuff, so a lot of that old stuff does not exist any more. I also had a song of the month. In MIDI format. It autoloaded. It was annoying as hell ;-)

As I learned how to mix audio, how to encode in Real format, how to design in Flash and code in ActionScript, and how to use photoshop, I added more things to my page including a monthly mix of real music (eh...let's just call it fair use since I was learning how to do do things with audio editors...), Flash-based menus, Java-applets, a page of links with things I liked, a guestbook (another thing that was all the rage at the time, along with page counters...)

Eventually the localization bug bit me, so I used my website as a means of connecting with friends through these proto-blogs, but I was also translating my blogs to the languages I was learning in college (Italian, German, French, etc.). There was a perpetual "under construction" sign on the site (also, quite indicative of the time period)...

Time progressed, and Geocities hosting wasn't allowing me to do FTP uploads. Since I wanted to experiment with something called rapidweaver on my mac, I moved over to dotMac hosting. I was already subscribing to dotMac for addressbook, calendar, and bookmark syncing, why not use the "free" hosting on there by putting my rapidweaver exports into my web folder? At this point I was blogging in English with Rapidweaver's tool, I was using Blogger, and WordPress, and Posterous, and a few other services. On the microblog side of things, I was on twitter, on plurk, posterous, pownce, and jaiku. I used a service called HelloTxT to cross-post. This was a time period of lots of experimentation with various (and similar) Web 2.0 services.