History of Red Bird Island


The following is a short history of my Website adventures. It's doubtlessly incomplete as I didn't keep records in the early days and can't even find many of my old pages using the Wayback Machine. This document is more for my own purposes than reader interest, but I post it for the curious.

I started experimenting with HTML around 1995. In 1996, after many hours of work, I published my first Website on Tripod with a 200 KB account (at the time, I thought 200 KB was plenty). The Website had a lame page with boring information about me (sort of like this one …) and a monthly column where I ranted about something silly, like bad behavior in MUDs. It went through different designs, from a C-Net inspired left navigation to a page filled with frames. After a while, I wanted more Webspace so I moved to Geocities, where I had 1 MB (!) of space.

In December of 1997, I created Red Bird Island. Using the island graphic, I designed a site where each part of the island was a different section (downloads was the coffee brewery, about was the village, links the port, news the beach, the volcano was for art). Unfortunately, I filled up my account with cool graphics and had no room left for content, so I moved to Xoom, which offered 10 MB of free Web space. At the same time I decided to redesign the site and start a business.

I went into Web design under the moniker Red Bird Island Productions. Alas, because of my youth and inexperience, the business failed, but I learned a lot about professional Web design.

On 5 Feb. 1999, I moved my site to Crosswinds and redisigned it. Inspired by Etherbrian's Etherknot Website, I tried to put most of the content on the index page, but, the site grew to multiple pages as I wrote FAQs and essays. The design was similar to the original Red Bird Island, with parts of the island labeling sections of the site. That was a fun design that a lot of people enjoyed. Eventually I had problems with Crosswinds and moved the page to iTools, newly started by Apple. I liked Crosswinds, but they were having too many problems for me to stay.

After moving to iTools, I gave the site a minimalistic. Gone were the fancy graphics and careful spacing. The site featured mainly text formatted using standard HTML elements and basic CSS. The site was functional, but not very pretty. I stuck with that design for about two years and it saw the Website grow and expand greatly, branching off into a few seperate sites because there was simply more content than Red Bird Island could hold. Spread across multiple iTools accounts, life was easy. Then, iTools came to an end.

The site is now hosted on .Mac, Apple's for-pay Web service. Because .Mac offers 100 MB of Web space (iTools offered on 20 MB), the various sites that I created are all back in one place, albeit each still has its own design and looks separate from Red Bird Island. The current design was spurred by this move, not because I had to, but because I wanted to and the move to .Mac was a good excuse to get around to doing it. I have since started using Dreamweaver templets to simplify the process of updaing the site's design.

Posted: Wed - May 5, 2004 at 07:53 PM        

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