Talk about a milestone! Today marks 20 full years since the ii News launched with a post celebrating Dad’s 59th birthday. (By some strange coincidence, today is his 79th birthday)
The first steps of the blog were small. It was more of a programming project for me than anything else. It started on my Power Mac 7500 running Quid Pro Quo and running Perl CGI scripts. It wasn’t long before I moved to more standard technologies but it was a start. I’m sure I have a backup on CD-ROM of the original site, but I’m not sure where. I even fired up the Power Mac to see if it was there and runnable, but it wasn’t. There was the immediate precursor to the dynamic ii News there:
That static page became the framework for a site that you could add stories from the browser. When I had a server that could run Apache, my home-brew site got replaced by Nucleus CMS, and WordPress later on.
There has been so much that has happened in these 20 years that it would be impossible to try to summarize it properly. Every year, I try with the “retrospective” posts, and that takes hours. Cats, kids, houses, births, deaths, moves, hobbies, sports, art… it’s a rollercoaster. There was a dark time sometime around 2010 when I considered shutting it down. Facebook was a microblogging site that was on the rise, and Tammy and I were both starting to put stuff there. It was so much easier to put pictures there, and most of the people we knew were there. I think it might have been the fact that Mom and Dad weren’t on it that saved the site. I was against shutting it down, but it seemed like it was only me who cared. Time has proven that it was the right decision 🎉 3391 posts and counting.
It started before the kids were born, so that means it’s the whole story. Sometimes I wish it went back further. There is a lot of the time in Prince George and before that is only in fading memory and a small number of photos.
Updated
There’s no better way to get me to find something than to assert that it was something that I lost. Even if it’s me who asserts it. I found the backup of the old ii News folder with CGI scripts and everything. It took a bit to get it running, but here it is.
Yes, it’s a cosmetic replica of Mac OS 8.6. The Apple, File and Edit menus pull down with lists of links, and the Control Strip pops up a menu to create, update or delete items.
No, it doesn’t resize. No, there’s no pagination of the news items, it’s just one long list. The data file on the server is just plain text HTML content. It’s all totally open and unsecured… Makes you wonder why I had it running at all. The Internet was a different place then?
But I found it and got it running on 26 year old hardware.
How time flies………