Site History
I recently came across, by way of Archive.org and some old Zip disks, several old versions of this site. For the sake of nostalgia, I’ve turned the results of these findings into a brief, illustrated history of alexras.info (formerly known as acr-web.com). Clicking any of the images will open a larger version in a new window.
This site first saw life as a way to use the 6 megabytes of space that came with the family’s Earthlink dial-up account. It was first launched just as I was entering high school in the fall of 1999 as a vanilla HTML text-and-graphics site with little more than a simple opening blurb and a links page. I wrote it in BBEdit Lite on my first computer, a Macintosh Performa 6400 running Mac OS 7.0 at a blazing 233 MHz. Sadly, the original version of the site has not survived.
One of the site’s earliest major overhauls, shown above, made use of Javascript image rollovers, which I thought was pretty cool at the time. You can’t really tell from the picture, but all those images miraculously gained blurred yellow borders when moused over. I recall ripping the code for the rollovers out of Javascript for Dummies or some equivalent book. The updated date on this image is 1/19/01, but I’m almost positive that I used this style for a number of months.
Later in 2001, the site layout changed again. It is here that I discovered that tables can be used for layout. I know, pure tables are considered one of the seven deadly sins of layout these days, but when CSS still sucked (and I didn’t know what it was) tables were the only way to go. The ‘News’ section was also something vaguely resembling a blog. Take that, blogging revolution.
I began the first of several rapid-fire modifications of the site in early 2002. My discovery of frames and, later, iframes, led to one frame arrangement, then another, and still another. This was one of the least successful. It’s also the only complete example of a past layout I can find.
Between 2002 and 2003, the end of college applications and the onset of senioritis led to the creation of more than half a dozen new layout schemes. Sometime during this period, I discovered PHP and started making the site more dynamic.
