Using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

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)