I’ve had a vanity domain name for a long time. The whois record for jimpick.com says I registered my domain way back in May 1996.

Domains were pretty expensive back then – I think it was $75 US for 2 years. That was super expensive for me at the time. I had just turned 26, and I had just quit a steady job in a big IT department to start freelancing because I was so very excited about the Internet.

Let’s laugh at the first version of this site, thanks to the Wayback Machine:

Do you see?

• Frames! The frame on the right had a menu, but it doesn’t display in modern browsers. :-(
• A Java applet! When it worked, it displayed some spinning 3D Text that said “Java” (maybe I’m a WebGL hipster?)
• Linux 2.0 on a 386DX/33. I started with Slackware before I switched to Debian. I was paying $200/month to co-locate my server at a small ISP in Penticton, BC, Canada. I had set up my own DNS, web server, email server, and was renting space out to friends and clients.
• Comic Sans!

In a lot of ways, I had a better online web presence 19 years ago than I do today. With this new staticly built blog, I hope to build a foundation for the next 19 years.

I have plans to add comments to this new blog. In the meantime, you can share your thoughts with me on Twitter.