Yesterday I discussed the history of the hypercubed blog.  The Hypercubed Blog is only one year old (as of yesterday) but I've been running my own website in one form or another for many years.  My first site was at Geocities way back in 1996 or so. I eventually got tired of the their advertisements being shown on "my" site so I switched to my own pay  account.  My URL at that time was http://www.concentric.net/~labtek/ (Internet archive is available). I ran what I called Labtek's Laboratory and Labtek's Physics Forum. Labtek's Physics Forum was not a forum at all but really just a set of physics related links.  This was before Google so finding stuff on the web was a little more difficult in those days.  This entire site was coded by hand in a text editor.  Matter of fact the only dynamic portion of my site was a simple perl based guest book.   Labtek's Laboratory served it's purpose at the time... giving me experience with HTML and web design.

In 2000 I purchased hypercubed.net.  I wanted my own domain so that I can run my website with out the worry of changing hots and therefore URLs.  I took the .net domain because hypercubed.com was taken at that time. This was my first full URL.  Soon after purchasing hypercubed.net the hypercubed.com URL became available so I snagged that one up also.  I hosted these URLs on a windows server and created my entire site using ASP with a clunky templating system consisting entirely of <!-- include --> statements.  I tried for a while to use this site to resell web hosting and provide site design.  I'd like to point out that this was a time before everyone and their brother was a web host reseller and/or designer.  I soon discovered that without any real value added services my "customers" would be better off hosting directly to my host.  My website design fees were pretty cheap for those days but other web designers started to readjust their prices in response to the bursting .com bubble.  I quit the business before I made any real money.  So with two URLs and no business what the point of hypercubed.com. Well, I started to use hypercubed.com as a projects website. If I developed something I thought was neat I created a page on my site to show it off.  Problem with this was that each time I added a page I needed to make it fit into the hierarchical structure of my website.  Under this structure most of the pages were hard to find and it seamed a bit awkward but there was really no alternative I could think of at the time. That was how websites were back then.

In 2005 I still had hypercubed.com running but I decided to try out this blogging thing.  Yes, I was late, very late.  Blogging had already come and was in the middle of peaking.  Better late then never so I jumped on the band wagon.  I started running hypercubed blog and posting all my little computer recreations to the blog.  This is great because I don't have to worry about where to put each item in my websites structure.  Rather then being hierarchical and project based a blog is chronological.  It works, it makes sense.  Why didn't I think of it sooner?  I may have arrived late on the blogging scene but it was what hypercubed.com was supposed to be.