A Trip Down Memory Lane

Have you ever heard of the “Way Back Machine”? It’s essentially an internet library… storing digital content found on the web. It’s intent is to ensure that possibly important content regarding our society isn’t lost when someone chooses to hit the ‘delete’ key. One of the interesting features is that you can plug in a web URL and ‘look back’ at not only the content previously stored there… but the web design itself. How about a glimpse into what was for jimkirk.org, shall we?

January, 2002 - “Jim: Unplugged” first emerges using an interesting table-driven design. Lots of blue and grey. Interesting.

January, 2003 - Looks pretty much the same, but I added a content management system and a polling system…

January, 2004 - I was really kicking it up a notch in 2004. Loved this design. Still do.

February, 2005 - Pretty much the same as in 2004. I was using a content management system called “Daedalus”. Written by my friend Jason Nugent.

March, 2006 - This was when I really started mucking around in my code trying to make it my own. I ditched the antiquated left aligned menu in favor of the dynamic drop-down lists. This was the cleanest design I ever had.

Wow, that brings back memories.

The one thing I will say about this iteration of jimkirk.org is that it took me a percentage of the time to bring this together. This is really only a couple of hours worth of work… the technology has come so far that it’s just really simple for someone not technically inclined to click some buttons and create a website that both looks good and has enough functionality to start throwing your thoughts, pictures and files out to the internet at large.

Kudos to Google. They saved me a lot of time and effort this time around.

If you want to throw up a website for nothing and are already using gmail… you should check out Google Sites.