10 years!

Anoop Sankar — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:09:41 +0000

So finally I have dedicated some time to do research for this post. Here you go :)

1999, sometime in November, armed with a brand new 28.8 kbps dial-up internet connection, I began my first endeavour on the Internet. I uploaded my first webpage. I still remember how exciting it was back then; to see my HTMLs being served for the first time to people around the world. So here I present a ‘Rusty’ museum of sorts; with screenshots of how this website evolved into what you see now. It was a great nostalgic trip back; seeing all these sites again :)

Click on the images to zoom

November 1999

This was the first version; hosted at spaceports.com. I was still learning how things were working. Notice the awful choice of colours!

November 2000

Even worse colour comibination; but now with more content and also the hottest retro thing on the web – Java! (the left nav bar)

February 2001

Things are getting way better now; the colours don’t hurt the eyes much. Not too much improvement with the content though; except for the embaressing bio-data up front :D

September 2001

The first ‘real’ design. Java is gone, CSS comes in. Design is still very teenage; with a goofy name for the site ‘SmileHouse’! But this really special; because this was when I started writing my blog :) I had also shifted to a much better host called DigitalRice.

August 2002

CSS skills have improved beyond recognition! I really loved this design. The site has become more dynamic; as I had finally learned some PHP. The blogging system there was hand coded in PHP. And this time the site moved to paid hosting; even though I never really paid :) It was hosted for me by Vishnu and Vivek at sig9.com

October 2003

And finally the base for the current design. I also dumped my buggy blog engine for WordPress. And around 1.5 years after this; I finally had registered a domain for myself. The hosting also slowly shifted to asmallorange.com; with the space provided by Anand bhai. It has remained there ever since.

You can also browse some of the sites from the Internet archive:

It was hardwork to get this done; I had to find my old hard disks; then get it working and so on.. but it was all worth it. Special thanks to Shyam for letting me plug-in my dusty 10 year old HDD on his PC!

Rusty » history

10 years!