Gen X Nostalgia
The page that wouldn't die
By Ian Legler
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Around 1996 or so, I was working as a software engineer for TRW, a large defense contractor.
I had been using the internet since college, email and usenet mostly. I remember being excited when the NCSA browser was finally ported to the Mac, so I could surf the web from my desk at work.
I began working on various CGI programming projects, and learned just enough HTML to be able to generate pages with my scripts. At the time, I was much more interested in learning PERL. A friend of mine got an account with a web hosting company, and I began thinking of ideas for a site of my own to practice my HTML skills. Yahoo! had a category in its directory under Cool Links for Generation X, but it didn't have a lot of good links. I was interested in the whole concept of Generation X, but I was more interested in the stuff Gen Xers were into, rather than the issues with generational politics. So I decided that my first page would be site about Gen X Nostalgia. I searched the web, found some cool sites, created some images, and put up a few pages. My friend and I eventually got our own domain, wheatmedia.com, and changed hosts a couple of times. I think we kept the pages on our site through the first move, fixing the page a little and updating the links, but eventually we just deleted it. So, a few years ago, when I did a periodic check of the web for my name, I find that our original web hosting company is still serving the original version of the site, unchanged since 1996. It even has my now defunct email address at TRW, my employer at the time, as the contact. Since I haven't been paying to have the pages hosted for about six years now, there is no way for me to update it. In early March of 2003, I checked again, and guess what? It was still up. It it pretty hideous. The pages are badly laid out and break almost every cardinal rule for web design: they use ugly and annoying animated gifs, they have distracting background images, they have too much capitalization, there is no consistency between pages, the list goes on. Well, as of the end of March of 2003, it looks like the company was bought out, or went out of business, or changed its name, or something. Their ownership of the domain, vsconnect.com, lapsed. So my original site is no longer being served there. However, they still haven't bothered to bring down the actual web server. it is still chugging away at its original IP address. |
© 2003 Wheatmedia