A Website That Grew Up With Me

Seventeen years ago this month I registered my first domain.

That was when Facebook was still desktop only, Android 1.0 had just been released, most smartphones of the day ran Symbian OS, and Instagram didn't exist yet.

That wasn't my first website, of course. I had multiple ones since 2000, and their existence depended mostly on the mood of whichever free hosting company I was using at the time. They're all gone now, alongside the companies that used to host them for me.

It was the first time I had a space I could truly call my own, not a subdomain of someone else.

I never let it go. Today it simply redirects here, where I now live.

I’ve changed it to pelica.net when I first started thinking of myself as a professional adult. In fact I ran both of them for a bit, as they were serving different purposes - the original, personal blog and the pelica.net was my portfolio, which was complementing my CV. Which, of course, has changed since. In fact, it has changed a lot.

When the Internet Was Small

I don’t remember what prompted me to create my first website. My best guess is that it was a natural next step of my exposure to the internet at the very young age - I was always interested in technology and in how things work.

The first page I have ever made was just a HTML file with big <marquee><h1>Welcome to my first website!</h1></marquee> at the top and a few links to my favourite sites at the time. For those of you who don’t know what a long since deprecated <marquee> tag does - it allowed you to put a text that moved from one side of the screen to the other. Peak HTML 4.01.

The website was published on one of the free hosting providers available. I believe at some point it was piotr.pelica.w.interia.pl (which, of course, no longer exists). There was a few throughout the years, but they all were the same in the end - some limited space, someone else’s subdomain and FTP file transfer via Total Commander.

The first time I have actually published a website, after trying every single option and every single combination to upload the files in a way they worked, stuff broke, of course. Turns out that you really needed to specify the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1250" /> in the source for the page to display correctly…

No matter, though, as this was quickly solved after a few searches on that brand new search engine called “Google”. Who knows, they seem to know what they’re doing, heck, they might even be big one day and take over NetSprint…

Then came the time to show-off - I have sent the link to a few members of the family first, then showed it to people at school, set it as my Gadu-Gadu (Polish ICQ) status - basically anyone who had a pulse and showed even a modicum of interest.

I don’t remember what happened next. Most people I knew weren’t really that big on this whole “internet thingy” that I seemed so absorbed by. All I know is that I kept going.

From Borrowed Space to My Own

Along the years I had websites, portals, eventually things I actually coded myself, full of security holes of course, but each vulnerability I learned of I patched quickly - and of course I did - I was at school, so I had time.

When money first started appearing in my life I decided to spend some on my own domain name. Well - the renewals, because the registration was paid for by my mum as an early birthday gift.

And so in February 2009 I became a proud owner of dragonsheart.eu.

Of course having a domain name doesn’t mean much unless you have a place to park it, so I’ve updated the DNS, started migrating my blog to the new domain name… and of course couldn’t wait for the 24 hours needed for the DNS propagation, so forced myself to the correct IP address via the hosts file…

It all started with the free host I used at the time, which quickly became troublesome (didn’t want the free hosting provided by X inserted into every page, which would also break AJAX requests). A friend had a hosting which he was sharing with his dad and he offered to host my website too (you have to bear in mind that the websites back then were tiny compared to today - I could fully fit inside the 25 MB of space I had assigned to me - with the photos!), to which I quickly agreed to.

One FTP and DNS setup later I had a professional (or so I thought at the time) hosting. No more “free hosting” banners, no more ads inserted by them. Truly my own space.

Unfortunately this arrangement got tiresome pretty quickly, as I had to ask for any configuration changes instead of making them myself… so I found my first customer ever, built them a website and used the money towards own account with the same host.

Which turned out to be a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, typical shared hosting, but also - typical shared hosting. And the customer support was… pretty much non-existent. Or very… sure of their superiority.

Eventually I outgrew the shared web hosting, as suddenly access to ports 80 and 443 only (http and https) became limiting - I wanted to run things that weren’t just websites. So I migrated to a donated hardware, which literally meant putting a computer… in my bathroom (between the wall and a washing machine). Yes, I know, I know. I was young and, uh, inexperienced. And also annoyed by the fans at 2 am. That of course didn’t last long - about six months, after which my parents received a new electric bill. Whoopsie…

So I quickly realised that this arrangement will not work and migrated to my first VPS. What a wonder that was - finally I wasn’t limited by the bandwidth of the residential broadband (and I didn’t have to pay extra for a public IP anymore, as that was still a thing back then).

You see, I had some experience from fighting the Nightmare server (that was literally the hostname of the PC in the bathroom) with setting a Linux box to act as a website host and I was subscribing to a lot of RSS feeds¹ about security and server administration, plus forums were a thing and I could just ask questions and random people on the internet would just… help me. For free. Because an anonymous kid wanted to learn.

This, of course, led to a stable VPS that allowed me to host all my websites, all the APIs for my Android apps, and some game servers on top of that - with a cool address to give to players, like minecraft.dragonsheart.eu (even though Minecraft wasn’t a thing yet, but it’s a good example).

The Long Blog Phase

All of that was mostly a story about hosting and it’s often difficult to say one without the other, but with all those shenanigans on servers one thing stayed constant - I had my domain name.

For the longest time, I think, I hosted a blog there, in one form or another. Whether it was news from my journalistic phase or stories from my writing phase - or just thoughts put on paper in the database - I had a place to put my words somewhere into the void - to whoever was willing to listen.

And boy, I had opinions 🙄

I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, or whether at all, but looking back I guess it felt natural to me - I was spending more time on the internet than anywhere else and back then the only way to add to it was either forums or your own website. Sure, Facebook started opening up a few years later, but before that you either wrote something yourself or used WordPress. And of course I had my WordPress phase too.

Regardless of the platform - I had my place. And the place evolved with me. I cannot possibly count how many times I restarted the thing - sometimes with the blog, other times as a blog, or without any form of publishing at all at times. And every time the blog started anew, first post was always “sorry for not writing” or “blog starts… once again”.

Grown Up Mode Activated

With time the domains changed too. At some point I was running them as separate websites, in the end they became redirects.

The biggest shift, I think, happened when I first started my professional career as a software engineer. I realised that I needed a portfolio to show to my potential employers. And, to be fair, I didn’t want to direct them to the site containing my posts from back when I was 13…

This was the time I started to think about what I publish, how it affects me, and what consequences it might have. You see, by now everyone was on the net, not just a few network admins who were helping each other set up the best version of the completely insignificant config file and had strong opinions on that. No, this was the time when companies started looking you up while deciding whether to hire you or not.

So a professional website was born - stuff that wouldn’t fit on the CV, but that would allow people to know me better when deciding if I’m a good fit for the team. The list of my previous works - websites I created for customers, apps, random projects that were good enough to showcase to the public.

As I started working, first as a junior, I learned things. Things that prompted me to learn even more on my own. This, of course, turned out to be a great thing, because stuff I learn outside of my job I can use at my job and vice versa.

I learned about performance and why it is important - which was easy to grasp, remembering the era when computers were way less powerful than today’s budget smartphones. I learned standards, accessibility, much more about web and its underlying infrastructure.

And coming back to the personal website - I had my adventures with dedicated servers just to realise that I do not need all that power. I had my adventures with platforms, frameworks. In the end I decided on writing something of my own. It has come to my attention that despite the maintenance I have to put in, it actually makes me happier than clicking “update”. And that I like the fact that I can tinker with something to the point I can say I’m proud of it. I mean just look at this site. The page you’re reading right now has, in all likelihood, rendered under 100 milliseconds. That’s less than one-tenth of a second!

Seventeen Years Later

I guess having my own domain is one of the most permanent things in my life. I’ve lived through a lot of changes. Heck, I moved to a different country. Despite all of that one thing remained constant - since February 2009.

And the thing is - I still tinker. I still add things, replace them with better ones. This post itself was prompted by a massive refactor of the website under the hood - I have replaced five completely different entities, like albums and blog posts - with one. Everything is now “just a post”. And I’m proud of it, because I’ve done so without any loss of data or performance, even if nobody on the frontend will notice any changes.

At first I wanted just a technical write-up of that refactor, but then I realised that it’s technically my anniversary of getting that domain. And it’s wild to say that I’ve been on the web for 27 years. For 17 of those I had a place I could call home.

I suspect I’ll still be tweaking it years from now, long after I forget what this refactor was even about, but one thing I know for sure - this little corner of the web is still mine.

Also - a huge shoutout to Archive.org. They rock. Go donate to them