the server

my first homepage was started in 1996 on my pc in my dorm room. i still remember the address: it was http://b61956.cwru.edu. at the time students were not allowed to pick their own names. we were lucky enough to have some kind of entry in the nameservers!

in my second year, i moved out of the dorms, and i lost my fabulous internet connection. but i met alex, who was a computer science major at the time. and we found some old hardware, a 486 i believe, and set it up... yeah, where did we set it up? i do remember we could get some ip addresses and definitely choose our own names. alex wanted to call it "discordia", and so it came online as http://discordia.cwru.edu/~tinton/. i remember that that server sat in my office at university hospitals for a bunch of time, and that i think before that, it sat in eli's dad's office, in the math department. yeah, i think that's were it started off, in an office of the math department.

and then at u.h. it was no problem until i worked there. after two years, i left. johnny took my spot for a year or two, and i asked johnny if i could leave the discordia in the office. he had no problem with it, but he didn't quite understand that its presence in that office had to remain a secret to his boss. so some months later, in good faith, he mentioned the server to the boss, the boss was surprised, and the server had to go.

at this point alex came to rescue, found some new hardware, and found a cool data-center and the server was moved to california, where it found a new name: alex like "brillig", so it was http://www.brillig.org/~tinton/ and since we had our own domain, i immediately took advantage of it and named it http://tinton.brillig.org

eventually i moved the left icon bar to the top, and simplified the page into just two frames.

the looks

originally, the page was a simple single html page, with everything in it.

soon i realized, though, that i wanted more than one page, and that i wanted to have a way to add content and not have to worry about the graphics. i also didn't want to have to change all my pages if i wanted to change the looks of my site. so that's when i decided to introduce frames. version 2 of my webpage had a vertical frame on the left with various icons representing the different sections of the site and a horizontal frame for the header.

that worked out fine, but a major problem still remained: the site was esthetically horrible. something needed to be done, but nobody wanted to help me out. eventually, i asked professional help from a good friend of mine, jeff vincent, who had recently graduated from the cleveland institute of art. jeff accepted and was hired to develop the new looks of my site. he came up with the theme of the duck, and some years later he delivered this site.

it took me another year or two to put it together. i wanted the site to be dynamically generated and easily modifiable, and this took some time.