absent.canadian

Conversation about anniversaries on this blog hasn’t been particularly happy of late, but I’m writing about a different sort of anniversary, and a happier one.

Today is this blog’s fourth anniversary.

Four years is a monumentally long time in technology years, and it’s certainly the longest that this website has gone without some fundamental change.  And I thought this would merit some retrospective.

I bought the mikehelms.org domain way back in 1999 - before I was married, and before people tended to own personal domains.  The main reason I bought it had little to do with having a website; it was more about keeping a consistent email address.  In the five years prior I had email addresses at Trent University, the now-defunt tvo.org bulletin board, Sir Sandford Fleming College, and my parents’ old ISP - iCan.  The prospect of changing my email address again didn’t appeal to me in the least, and mikehelms.org was thus born.

One of the best things I ever did was to keep all of my old websites.  Here are some screenshots of a few of them for your amusement.  Each one reflected some HTML “milestone” in my self-taught odyssey to learn web development - from basic hyperlinks to database-driven content.

mikehelms.org - Version 6

The first version of my site that I have a copy of dates back to 1997.  I did this rather simple design in the GIS room at Sir Sandford Fleming College way back in the day - before mikehelms.org even existed (I was piggybacking off of my parents’ hosting at that point).  It’s obvious what my three main interests were; Volkswagens, Canadian music and photography.  How little things have changed in 11 years.

Prior to this, my websites were text-based, simple and boring.  This was my first real attempt to come up with a “look”, and it worked.  I landed a few good web design contracts with this basic site, and it would be the second longest-lived version of my site (succeeded only by the Wordpress site you’re viewing now).

mikehelms.org - Version 7

The next version of my site was short-lived.  In the previous version I had used an image map for my links (remember those?).  In this version I broke everything up into separate images and recomposed it with a table.  It wasn’t the prettiest, but it served its purpose.  And it was on this version of my site that I sold my first photograph internationally; a portrait of King Tut’s gold mask that I took in Cairo - bought for some educational CD-ROM’s produced by the British Museum.  Sadly, this site was only live for a few months … followed by …

mikehelms.org - Version 8

This version.  I was particularly fond of this design because virtually everything was text-based (except for the handwritten bits, which gave it a nice feel).  This version of my site would only be succeeded in complexity by my CMS-driven blog sites … which we’ll get to in a minute.

Part of the complexity of this site was my Stompin’ Tom Connors discography.  This little nugget was one of the pieces that generated a good bit of web traffic for me, and it was part of what contributed to my becoming one of Tom’s webmasters.  That was a fun gig while it lasted.

mikehelms.org - Version 10

This homepage was short lived - which is a shame, because in retrospect I think it was one of my cleaner designs.  It was one of the first times I really tried to do something visually appealing without worrying about things like how it would look on a printer (kind of a moot point - how many home pages do you print?).  Ironically, I was still using the same visual elements as my version 6 from 1997.

mikehelms.org - Version 11

This version of my site went back to frames.  It also started to bounce off the edge of being too complex to manage as a collection of static pages (yes, even at this point I was still hand-coding everything).  Most of the content was carried over from previous versions, but I was working hard to keep the “look” fresh and new.  I can’t really say it worked here; I had some good ideas but the final execution still looked very web 1.0.

Not that web 2.0 had been coined yet …

mikehelms.org - Version 12

And this was the last version of my site before I went to the blog format.  It was all about the cameras now - and this would be the first time that the content changed significantly in the history of my site (a pattern I would repeat when I started the absent.canadian blog).  This was also the first time I used a database to store content; every camera in my little online camera museum was an entry in a database.  It was crude and required manual edits to the database to change the content, but it helped me “see the light” and made me realize that maintaining hundreds of static pages was dead.

It also represented my first effort to have an “artistic” looking site; something that wasn’t just header and paragraph tags.

I thought about the idea of a blog a few years before I started the absent.canadian, but it never really gelled until I stumbled across a page about a blogging package called bBlog.  I was really interested in PHP and wanted to tinker with a CMS, and this seemed like the easiest way to try things out.

Alas - the absent.canadian was born.

Since I had no real “vision” for this blog, it started modestly.  I had the good sense to post for about a month before I started “promoting” it - ensuring that there was some critical mass of content.  I quickly got into blog exchanges, blog promotion sites like Blog Explosion and all sorts of other gimmicks people were tinkering with for self-promotion.

Thankfully, I also knew that the best way to spread my world-wide-web tentacles would be to build up a body of diverse content that would get absorbed into the various search engines.

Which brings me to my last reflection: notable blog posts.

Every blogger of substance has a collection of posts that have really resonated with readers.  They’re posts that months, or even years later, still get traffic.  They become touchstones for some particular sentiment or idea, and they’re the posts that you’ll proudly refer back to when you’re feeling a lack of comment love.

For me, the collection includes:

• My lament about the fall of Doc Marten shoes.  That is, when they stopped being made in England.
• The story of the skull.  Or - getting pulled over by the police when you have a human skull in the passenger seat.
• My rather merciless, but highly educational post about camera buying.
• My top-10 dumb vehicles lists.
• Blogging about buying a new vacuum cleaner - which is kinda dumb, but it had its loyal following.

It’s been a great four years.  I’ve met the best people through this blog, and it never ceases to amaze me how these little snippets of writing touch people.