I've been so busy lately that I almost forgot to post the fact that I have had a website up for 10 years. This current site and domain name 'mike-pereira.com' was set up in the summer of 2002. My first web page was posted (and I looked this up in my archives) on September 21, 1997 when I was a student at the University of Western Ontario.

I thought about how to make this tribute page. I could have spent some time doing fancy graphics, but I think the best way for me to mark 10 years of website history is to put up this simple page, a few links, and write about my experience over the years. This article will also be syndicated on my Blog!

The world wide web started to be popular, at least on university campuses all over Canada, around 1994. At that time I was beginning my first year. I logged onto the web from the Social Science Computer Lab. The university's own web page had recently been launched. Previous to that various departments and the library system had begun to migrate from their Telent pages. I was fascinated with the new medium. I could see right away that it had the potential to make computer communication accessible to the masses. At the time the mainstream media were starting to pick up on the 'Internet.'

The new hyper text mark-up language (HTML) was fascinating. It was a simple command based language, similar to a macro program. It would instruct a program called a 'browser' to display text and images called from basically a text file with a '.htm' extension. You could decorate the page with formatting commands and you could insert pictures by linking to gif or jpeg image files. The cool thing about a website is the ability to link to other pages on the Internet. I had some background in computer programming from high school and played extensively with BBS's, Telnet, and such. It was not long before I began to examine HTML and think about putting up my own website.

In the early days finding an ISP was not easy and not cheap. My first website was the one I designed for the Social Science Student's Council in 1995. It took until 1997 for UWO to finally offer free web space to all students. Previous to that, server space was only available to academic departments, faculty, students organizations, a few grad students, and some undergrads in select departments. By 1996 free web hosting companies such as Geocities opened up, but I did not like the format. Finally, in the summer of 1997 the university provided the entire student population with the opportunity to post their own web sites. There was a bureaucratic application process and a huge 'acceptable use' document we had to sign. The biggest hold-up in allowing students to post personal websites was not technological but rather the many legal questions that could arise from student web pages. I was one of the first students to get signed up for a personal page in the summer of 1997.

I keep everything backed up somewhere. Hey, I have just about every document I've ever written on a computer backed up someplace, going back to grade 9. It was no surprise that I kept a copy of my first personal webpage. It's very primitive. I simply modified the template page that UWO I.T.S. set up. Over the next few months I built a much slicker page, added graphics, frames, animations, and whatnot.

I chronicle the development of my website in this "History" document. Read through it for more details.

After graduating from UWO in 1998, I moved my website to space offered by my internet service provider at the time. I then transferred the site to web space provided by George Washington University when I was a grad student. It was then that I began thinking about a more permanent home for my website and I registered a domain name, got set up with a good host and built up the site since. Actually, there were big periods of neglect because I was busy with school and work, but hey, I'm not making money on this site.

Mostly, my personal site has been a place to test out new technology and to park stuff, like documents and files for my friends via FTP portals and such. It is also a really good way to host a CV and post documents I have written. There is also a photo gallery. I built mine myself before there were readily accessible photo hosting programs and before I had a digital camera, so it was time consuming to maintain. Imagine scanning photos, resizing them and cropping them to the web in Photoshop, making thumbnails, then building a webpage from a template to post the images? Now I use various programs to manipulate my photos and build the thumbnail galleries. I set up a blog on Blogger but with RSS I am able syndicate the content back to my personal website, so now the site gets updated regularly.

Well, that's the ten year history of my website.