About this site...
Somewhere on these pages I think I have claimed that this site has been in operation since 2006 but this is not completely true. It looks like the operation of andrews-corner.org itself did in fact start in June 2006 as the WayBack Machine will show. But the site existed in other forms for probably ten years before this.
So perhaps in the mid 90s, when the BBS system was shutting down, I realised that my dialup internet account with a very small company called Penrith Netcom came with a small amount of space for a 'personal home page'. It blew my mind completely when I realised that I could write up a page, load it to a server and this page could then be seen by the whole world! This still blows my mind by the way...
Fortunately for all of us these early efforts at this site with Penrith Netcom no longer exist and Penrith Netcom itself was eaten by a bigger company long ago. But I do remember that the pages were constructed with tables and at all times had the obligatory 'hit counter' in place which I feverishly checked each day to see what had been sent my way by AltaVista. Google of course was not such a big thing back then.
At this time I used WYSIWYG applications to develop my table based site and I remember using FrontPage before Microsoft bought it out in 1997 and also Macromedia Dreamweaver before Adobe bought it out in 2005. More importantly at this time I was having some solid web page creation lessons from the great HTML newsgroups of the era; all these have sadly been swept away by time and change. I learnt to produce CSS driven HTML, lost the tables and started using BlueFish as a web editor.
Deciding eventually to get a little more serious I bought a domain name in 2006 and at this time the current site officially began. Looking back it is comforting to see that some of my favourite pages from this time still feature in this site: For the God Who Sings, mutt and Gmail and Urban Myths and Homer's Iliad. Other pages have come and gone.
So now in 2023 I now write this site on a computer I built myself and use Geany to write the CSS and HTML from scratch with HTML5 compliance as an aim and with a completely CSS driven design. No more hit counters for me although I do watch the server stats from time to time!
And from here? Web page design has changed and there are not too many left who write syntactically correct HTML 'by hand' which saddens me a little. I will certainly continue to do so and also continue to develop this site and see where it leads me, what people I will meet with similar interests to me and where my interests will change and develop.
I do all of this because even now the idea that I can create a page and load it to a server, and this page can then be seen by anybody in the world, this idea is still very, very exciting!