Through the magic of the Internet Archive, I was able to find one of the first versions of my personal website.

My HTML and web design skills back then were as crap as possible, as this was done using a free site builder from tripod.com, and the idea of an online personal log didn’t exist back in 2002, I wasn’t posting regular updates, but merely updating my homepage’s content. I remember I was very social back then, used IRC a lot, and even had a personal forum, along with a Downloads sections and a “Notes” page which contained virtual hosts of Unix shells and proxies I used back then, along with some links. Unfortunately, none of those pages were archived by the Wayback Machine.

Design-wise, it seems this was back in the days where I really liked orange, inspired by the cover of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, before I discovered #fcc404, one of the colours I know by heart and is still my main colour (check the logo’s colour).

Somewhere in 2003 or 2004 I discovered Frontpage, FTP and uploaded my website to various subdomains of hosting companies that gave free internet space (like 5MB or so). Unfortunately, these were either not discovered by the wayback machine or used a cookie redirection method which made it impossible to be crawled.

I’ve also recreated the homepage as a first blog post, including my now-cringe style of writing I used when I was sixteen, with “sh” instead of the Romanian letter “ș”. I even added an English translation and you can read it here