On the 3rd July in 2001, I registered some domain names and signed up for a hosting package.
They were all vanity domains - just my name in different tld's (.com, .net, .org, and so forth).
About a week after that, a website was on this domain.
 
That was my second website. I actually thought it was my first, but when writing this I went back to some old diaries to verify the dates - and I found that I'd completely forgotten about an older web presence that I hosted on my ISP's free web space.
Remember when ISPs gave out free web space? Yes? Then you're old. It kinda sucks to realise that...
 
So, it looks like my first ever web presence arrived on Monday October 16th, in the year 2000. It would have been a static website, updated by uploading new pages via FTP.
 
And on the 3rd of July 2001 I got myself this domain name, because I'd been using that free web space quite a bit and I wanted a more personal identity on the internet.
By the 10th of July, the web pages on my ISP's web space was migrated across to this domain.
 
During its time, this domain has seen about three distinctly different websites. Ever used the Wayback Machine? Here's this website's first ever bit of content - including some nice nostalgia about how horrible Netscape Navigator 4 was.
(Which was sadly necessary, because that website looked HORRIFIC in Netscape Navigator 4. I mean, even worse than it looked when it was working properly.)
 
Here's the thing I've learnt over the fifteen to sixteen years of having a web presence:
It's nothing without content, and content takes more time than you think you have.
 
It's kind of amusing to read my older diaries and see what I was putting up on the website - it had a smattering of public text, but it seems that I was often sharing photo galleries from community meetups and the like - all secured by either obscurity or (in more private cases) a simple username/password.
Basically, I was using my website like social media, but before social media existing.
 
There was also, for a while, a calendar page. Again, password protected - but the idea was to let my friends know where I was going to be in the near future. Which is in some ways insufferably narcissistic, but was basically an attempt at making my friend's lives easier in the days when mobile phone calls were expensive, nobody had mobile data and even text messages weren't cheap.
 
All of thise was hand-crafted HTML, painstakingly tested against multiple web browsers.
 
These days, I don't bother with that. I use a Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal. I assume they've tested the design against all the browsers. I want to concentrate on the content, not on the code behind it.
 
My cycle used to be "go somewhere and/or do something, write up a review or work on photos, publish something".
Now you just take a photo when you're there, and shunt it out to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Whatever. Much simpler.
 
In theory, that frees up time for more content for this website. In practice, you have to go places and do things to get the ideas and experiences for content, which means you then have no time to write content. Also, everything you did when you were out getting the ideas and experiences is probably on social media anyway, so why bother?
 
I don't have a long-term plan for this website. It is what it is, and will become what it becomes. 15 years ago, I hadn't planned this far ahead - and I'm not about to start making long-term plans!
 
So here's to another 15 years...