In 1998, Joel’s Improved Personal Website was created with an account on a free hosting service called Icestorm, which was later sold to Stormloader. Unfortunately, after moving to another host, I lost the login details for this account.
For some reason they never closed that account, and amazingly, the Stormloader service has not been bought out or shut down. For six years that website has been sitting there, untouched and unaccessed, but still visible to the world.
…Until last weekend. I was going through some very old files, and out fell an index card with my Stormloader ID and Password written on it. As soon as I had time, I tried logging in – success. Finally, I was able to make some minor updates to forward people to the current address.
There are perhaps two elements from this original design that have survived over the past eight years.
- The practice of putting quotes at the bottom of each page (some of the quotes themselves are still in use).
- The chipmunk
Since the site has survived for so long under a state of total neglect, I have decided to leave it up almost exactly as it was. As well as being a miracle of data survival in what I would consider to be a fairly volatile arena (free web hosting leftover from the dotcom days), it also serves as almost a badge of authenticity. Writing online since 1998.
