Alpha Beta Gamma

I recently decided that my current website is actually version 5.2, not 4.4. This needs some explaining.

I learned web design through books on the advice of a friend. My first book (Elizabeth Castro’s HTML 4) along with View Source cut-n-paste got me writing my first rudimentary website in 2000. It wasn’t until early 2002 (through Geocities) that I learned how to FTP. It was a proud moment when I was able for the first time to see one of my jpegs on someone else’s computer via the net.

During the summer of 2002, I built my first website. It was hosted on Geocities and later moved to Instant Coffee‘s server.

Version 1

This went through a number of body-colour variations (and upper-right hand graphics) before it ended up as it remains today.

The Way-Back Machine shows me a site on the Instant Coffee server from February 2003 which I called then Version 4, meaning it was the 4th design revision I’d gone through since the above # 1, before I scrapped all this alpha-draft code later that summer.

My site, Feb 2003

When, in August 2003, I tried to apply what I’d learned in the previous year by building my first complicated site, using Youngpup.net‘s ypSlideOutMenus code. This page (as was proper for the time) even had a splash page.

Version 2

In August 2004, I again worked on redesigning my site, to incorporate what I’d learned in the previous year. This site used CSS and my then basic understanding of PHP Switches and MySql.

Version 3

I left this site for two years, until August 2006, when I began working on another redesign. However, while I began the basic layout during August, I backburnered it until December, and made it public in January 2007, when I acquired my timothycomeau.com domain name and new server space (until this time, the previous websites had been sub-directories of my host. The 2002-2003 sites had been found at tim.instantcoffee.org or instantcoffee.org/timothy and then the 2004-2006 site had been at goodreads.ca/timothy). For this reason, I sometimes refer to this design as ‘the 2006 one’ or ‘the 2007 one’. I’ve pretty much decided from here on to think of it as ‘the 2006 one’ since that’s how I’ve come to consistently remember it.

Version 4

Last December I began to redesign the site, to once again update it according to my expanded know-how. Because I felt I’d simply redesigned the menu and updated the logo, I felt that it was a version of #4 (most recently 4.4) and hence, until recently, I’d considered it such. But, I’ve come to think of the present site as a different ‘2008 version’ and figured I should just consider it a #5. Since the .dot numbers come somewhat arbitrarily via whatever small improvements I make here in there, I figured it’s present state is about two modifications away from where it was at in January (when I considered 4.2) hence, version 5.2.

Version 5