About

Here we go again. After several attempts over the past years to establish a longer-lasting, tiny presence on the web for myself, I landed with yet another idea on how to do it. This time I got inspired by an article I read from Parimal Saryal on “Rediscovering the small web”. Written back in 2020, but only recently read by me, it inspired me to think of the old days, when I got first in touch with the internet and website making.

My first website was built on Tripod a free webhoster of the early(?) internet. I did not even know how to create a hyperlink back then, but was very satisfied with a “single page application” to which I added some random stuff, for example the weather satellite image of the day.

To actually work on the website I had to dial into the internet with my blazing fast 56 kbit/s modem, that represented the fastest gateway to the internet in our household. The modem utilized a 15-meter-long cable that I had to deploy from my room all the way through the stairwell into the downstairs living room in which the telephone connection was located. I know grandpa talking here, but there was already quite some effort attached to even start working on a website. Not even mentioning the real cost (pay-per-minute), the struggle of a stable connection and also making sure that my parents did not wake up from the monstrous sound of the modem.

When all of those things worked in my favor, I was trying to learn about how to make websites eventually venturing also into the PHP world, mostly motivated by building websites for the various gaming clans I was part of over my teenage years. Counterstrike beta veteran talking.

The internet back then felt like quite a different place. Certainly, most of this feeling can be attributed to the sheer fact that I was younger, knew less and thus some stuff felt more exciting. Still, I think it is fair to say, the internet was a bit less corporatey, a bit less polished, rough around the edges and still was a place that my generation started to use as a second home. A place that felt cozy at times when all the self-made websites had snow gif animations around christmastime, guestbooks were seen on every page, AltaVista was a popular search engine, everyone communicated in IRC chats or ICQ and when there was not really such a thing as cross-site tracking and the feeling to be stalked by big corporations all the time.

In order to bring this chain of thought together, this website is held deliberately simple in terms of interactivity and design as an indirect homage to these better times of the internet. Likewise, its existence represents the ‘what-I-can-do’ in my little corner to keep the ‘simple, personal, non-perfect web’ alive and worth exploring. Obviously, this does not necessarily mean that you will find interesting content here, but at least original content. Adding this extra purpose to this website, maybe its stays alive longer than its predecessors.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can do that preferably via LinkedIn or you could send an e-mail to [firstname.lastname], obviously replaced with my first and last name, which you can find at the bottom of the page in Leetspeak plus @posteo.de.

Live long and prosper!