I was already in my 30s and a mainframe programmer back in 97 and jumped into teaching myself Unix and Perl. But also dabbling in VBScript and then later Javascript to write a Age of Empires battle calculator that got decent traffic. And a site dedicated to the computer game, with a Perl forum a cobbled and altered "Matt's WWW Scripts" beauty :) Next, around 99, I discovered PHP (when it was still v3) and built what later peopled termed a blog and CMS. I used it to build another gaming site and a fan site for a radio show that became the "official" site for the program. Later I built upon that custom PHP CMS to make a local news site that got heavy traffic for that age (early 2000s) but later sold my interest in the site (and it went defunct not even a year later).
On my original PHP CMS, I recall first using CSS book by Håkon Wium Lie & Bert Bos, original CSS developers, published back in 97 or 98, to try to go it full CSS back in 2000. It sort of worked, but was brittle. This was a few years before the CSS Zen Garden and advancing browsers quickly dispensed with the old tarted up "table" HTML.
But again, for all the great technological strides made, I miss that age -- it seemed we are all "swimming in one pool" -- and all doing our own thing, building and taming unchartered wilderness. Now, building a website for a "clever idea" seems pointless as everyone's online attention is on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest. Even Wordpress blogs seem to be getting passe. In that time, though, there was an energy and vibrancy on building things. Today it seems all the creative programming chops are directed at building silly social media mobile apps that are not much more than ICQ that can do multimedia.
I was already in my 30s and a mainframe programmer back in 97 and jumped into teaching myself Unix and Perl. But also dabbling in VBScript and then later Javascript to write a Age of Empires battle calculator that got decent traffic. And a site dedicated to the computer game, with a Perl forum a cobbled and altered "Matt's WWW Scripts" beauty :) Next, around 99, I discovered PHP (when it was still v3) and built what later peopled termed a blog and CMS. I used it to build another gaming site and a fan site for a radio show that became the "official" site for the program. Later I built upon that custom PHP CMS to make a local news site that got heavy traffic for that age (early 2000s) but later sold my interest in the site (and it went defunct not even a year later).
On my original PHP CMS, I recall first using CSS book by Håkon Wium Lie & Bert Bos, original CSS developers, published back in 97 or 98, to try to go it full CSS back in 2000. It sort of worked, but was brittle. This was a few years before the CSS Zen Garden and advancing browsers quickly dispensed with the old tarted up "table" HTML.
But again, for all the great technological strides made, I miss that age -- it seemed we are all "swimming in one pool" -- and all doing our own thing, building and taming unchartered wilderness. Now, building a website for a "clever idea" seems pointless as everyone's online attention is on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest. Even Wordpress blogs seem to be getting passe. In that time, though, there was an energy and vibrancy on building things. Today it seems all the creative programming chops are directed at building silly social media mobile apps that are not much more than ICQ that can do multimedia.