I found some interesting old sites of mine today...
In the past, when the Internet was a new thing to many people (well, to the general public) and domain name registration was like speaking a foreign language, I was actively encouraging people to regiter their own domains and email addresses as I could see it was only going to get a much busier place in the future!
Evan at that time, all of the three-letter domains had gone and the body that controls domain names was putting restrictions on 1- and 2-letter domain names (e.g. bt.com), although some registras still ignore this ruling and allow them).
So, I decided to register all the ones I thought I would need, especially for 'robertcrane'. I started with just '.COM' but soon added '.NET', '.ORG', '.CO.UK', '.ORG.UK' (although I later let the last one lapse).
Of course, once I had these domain names - and associated email addresses - I had to do something with them.
During the previous tear, I had had an accident that kept me off work (well, out of the buikding but not exactly 'not working'! - you can read about it here) and during this time, I had started to learn how to create webpages using pure HTML as there was nothing else around at the time, well, not much anyway.
This meant I had a number of sites so I spread them around the domain names I had. This meant there were a number of different sites covering different topics such as the Isle of Man, my own personal information and the 'team.lard' group in the Isle of Man.
Another reason for splitting them up was that webhosting compaines only allocated a small amout of space for a personal website and there wasn't room on one site for all of the stuff I wanted to put on show.
Eventually, a lot of that changed; Hosting companies started to increase the amount of space allowed for a website, more technolgies became available like JavaScript, XHTML, PHP etc. and the static sites just simply didn't look all that good. Coupled with the fact that many companies had now emerged that would produce very professional-looking websites invoving animations, picture galleries and even films (movies for the Americans!), although a lot of these features were still let down by the slow speed of most Internet connections. I still remember going online at 1200bps - now it's 8,000,000bps!
I also used the time to amalgamate many of myu sites into a single location (the one you are looking at right now!) but I never went back and removed some of the old sites, which I came across the other day and was quite amused.
Instead of deleting them, I made copies of them and include a few of them here if you want to have a look. I'll add to the list if I find any more.