Using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
March 31st, 2006 by Mark Rittman
I’ve just been having a play around with the
Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
which holds "copies of the internet" going all the way back to 1996. Using the
site, it’s possible to have a look at how sites looked several years ago, and so
I thought I’d take a trip down memory lane and
see how my site
looked over the years - you can click on the links to go to a fully-working
version of the site, which is pretty cool.
Going in chronological order, the first screenshot on the left
is from
February 2002, the first serious website I put together where I mostly
focused on the work I was doing with Linux and Oracle. You can see from the
style of the page that I was in "Unix hacker" phase at that time, to be honest I
was more likely to be playing around with Linux in my spare time rather than
Oracle. On the right is a smartened up version of the site from
June 2003,
with much the same content but also, if you look closely, my first ever blog
posting, done through blogger.com but using my own template.
Shortly after starting out using blogger, I quickly found it was
a bit limiting (no categories, no RSS feed at that time) and moved it all over
to Radio Userland (the left-hand screenshot) in
September 2003. I quite liked the default template that it came with - this
was when blogging was really taking off and Userland / Dave Winer was at the
centre of the blogger phenomenon. In the end though I quite liked the
extensibility of Moveable Type and over Christmas and
January
2004, I reworked it all and move it to MoveableType 2.6, which was around
the same time that Brian Duff moved over from Radio Userland as well and started
up Orablogs, which still runs on MoveableType 2.6 to this day.
As 2004 went on I wanted to add a bit more content to the site, and put some
links on to articles that I’d written, and ones written by other people that I
found useful. In
July
2004 I added some HTML DB-style tabs to the page with this additional
content, and the site pretty much stayed that way until the start of 2006, when
I gave it a bit of a makeover, expanded the "resources" section to include some
write-up and commentary on Oracle’s BI toolset, added a forum and expanded the
set of links and book recommendations. The final screenshot shows how the sites
looks in
March 2006, which is probably how it’ll stay for a while now as it’s
increasingly getting a big job to change things around.
While you’re there, you might be interested how
Oracle.com looked back in 1996 ("Visit the new Network Computer web site
for the most recent NC news!"),
Slashdot
in 1997 ("Should Netscape GPL Mozilla - Yes or No?") and
AskTom in 2001 ("Sorry, I currently have a large backlog of questions.
Please try back later" - not much changed there then)
