Recently I have been spending more time writing content for this website, and shortbooks.online. This has made me think about making websites in the early days.

I started ‘blogging’ around 2002, long before platforms like WordPress, Blogger etc. became mainstream or particularly easy to use. I had FTP access to my website hosting, and I taught myself HTML (and later, CSS).

Each post I wrote on my early blog was written directly in HTML, and I copied and pasted a commented out section of code that contained the structure of a post, including <H2> tags for the title, and a PHP comment section. Any unusual formatting, like a picture with wrapped text, or a table to contain data, had to be made by hand each time.

Making this website, and Short Books has been a relative breeze: Buy a domain and hosting, use the hosting’s ‘auto installer’ to install an open source content management system, and start writing. The CMS will even auto-update, without me having to go to the developer’s website, download a zip file, and attempt to upload it to my hosting through Ipswitch’s WS-FTP (or something similar).

If you need to jolt of nostalgia, take a look at this ancient news article from the BBC.

Do you have any fond memories of web technologies of old? Tell me about them in the comments.