Happy Birthday to this little old weblog of mine!
On this day, 21 years ago in 2001 that I went ahead and registered the domain name of this website, Hatchetation!
It’s all grown up now.
You can catch up some older versions of the site through snapshots in time at the Wayback Machine. Of course not many of the links work anymore including much of the graphics that I created at the time. I tended to be much more link focused back then, things I found interesting on the web and shared them. Here’s a link to one of the pages at the time. I remember being so proud of the design, basically a three column table. I do like the colors, Anyways this was done back when I hand coded everything in HTML, and I’d have to upload the updates manually every time using FTP. I still have this massive book on how to write HTML from back in the day. It was quite the resource for me. I wish I could find the even earlier versions of the site back from GeoCities but I think it’s on some zip disk that I can no longer read. Those very first pages of mine were just static and very simplistic. Before 2001 my site was called Markman’s Home on the Web. So I probably really got interested in websites probably back around 1998 or so.
Back then at first I was hand coded everything but eventually I found some software called Greymatter that some dude wrote in his spare time to automate a lot of the tasks like automatically creating the archives for you and helping with uploads and such and even a little of the design. It was pretty cool and I ran it for a long time but it ended up just not being supported anymore and I eventually I had to move on. I probably used it for way longer than I should have been since it pretty much died out by 2005.
Seems so cringe to me to read some of those posts now. It’s just where I was and my mindset at the time. Like, just take a look at this except from 1999:
“You lie down in your bed. You ponder the same things that I do. And yet we have trouble communicating it to eachother, almost afraid of what the other would do or say or take us a way we wouldn’t want them to envision. Still the thought lingers on your brain. It lingers on mine too, like a moth caught in a flame, can’t escape it, the flame licking at your thoughts, exciting, irritating, dangerous? Is it normal to feel this way or just childish foolishness? Can one read too much into something so little? Can something so little mean so very much? Haven’t you ever wanted to see your idols? Or just a new smiling face? Don’t you want to do it? Don’t you want to see things? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see things you see through someone elses eyes and get meaning, no matter how little, from it? Don’t you want to be shy or nervous? Don’t you want to see people as they are? Don’t you want to see what they can be like? Don’t you want to see me, imperfect as I am? Are you any more perfect than I? Don’t you want to feel alive? I do. I’d like to see you, but sometimes I think I’m scared. Afraid to expose myself. What if I’m not all you envisioned. I was safe in my anonymity but it was empty. Would it really matter what you thought? Can’t we just spend some time doing nothing? Maybe we have more in common than we ever thought. Maybe we’ll like what we see, or have a funner time together than we ever thought we would. Or maybe it would be the worst waste of time ever, but it isn’t it worth taking that chance? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the person behind the persona? To watch their body language, to see their voice speak in time with thier mouth? To actually be humans interacting. Real. To look into thier eyes and see yourself. Have I seen you before, passerbys without knowing? Do you know me? The real me? Would you care? Universes expanding and colliding in the space of a few minutes. And when its over, assuming it ever really happened wouldn’t it be grand to maybe want to see eachother again? Why do I get scared when I think that maybe those moments will never come? Wishful thinking, you close your eyes and go back to sleep. Will we really ever know eachother at all?“
Pretty cringe, right? Ah, youth.
Anyways, I’ve mentioned before how I came up with the name of this site. Markman’s Home on the Web was getting tiring and I wanted a “real” domain name. At the time I had just happened to be reading a biography of Carrie Nation at the time and couldn’t think of any other name. Although I did like the thought of the “cyclone of hatchetation.” Plus the thought of a bible-thumping, 6 foot tall old lady all dressed in black coming in with a hatchet smashing things must have been quite a sight. So even though this site has nothing to do with her or her beliefs and such, the name stuck. I had to come up with something and it just so happened at the same time I was reading that book about her. So that’s what I chose. Nothing earth shattering. What is earth shattering is that that happened over 20 years ago! Where did the time go? Holey Moley! In the time since I’ve think I’ve grown and advanced in many areas but there’s still some parts of me that will just never change. I suppose we are like that somewhat.
Maybe I am still pretty cringe.