Hello World!

Hello World

There was a time when the internet felt different.

Not necessarily better in every way, but smaller, stranger, and far more personal.

Back in the late 1990s, the web wasn't dominated by algorithms, influencers, or billion-dollar platforms. It was built by ordinary people with too much free time, a copy of Notepad, and an idea they thought was worth sharing.

I was one of them.

If you were online during that era, you'll probably remember Geocities. Entire neighbourhoods of personal websites dedicated to music, football teams, gaming clans, favourite TV shows, or whatever else happened to capture someone's imagination that week. Nobody was worried about branding, engagement metrics, SEO scores, or conversion rates. You built a website because you wanted a website.

The result was chaotic.

Animated GIFs flashed everywhere. Visitor counters proudly displayed numbers in the low hundreds. Pages took forever to load over dial-up connections. Half the internet seemed to be permanently under construction.

And it was brilliant.

Search engines were different too. Before one company swallowed the web whole, there were dozens of options competing for attention. Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves. Finding information felt less like querying a giant database and more like exploring.

Then there was Netscape Navigator, which at the time felt like a glimpse of the future. Every new browser release promised exciting new possibilities, and every web developer promptly discovered three different ways to break their site.

Communication was different as well.

Long before social media, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat. Endless chat rooms filled with people from all over the world. If you know, you know.

The standard greeting was often:

ASL?

Age, Sex, Location.

A question that instantly dates anyone old enough to remember using it.

People met strangers online, discussed music, swapped stories, argued about nonsense, and sometimes formed friendships that lasted for years. It felt less like broadcasting and more like participating.

Looking back, I think what I miss most is the individuality.

Personal websites were everywhere. They didn't exist to build a personal brand. They weren't optimised for advertising revenue. They weren't carefully curated content strategies.

They were simply digital spaces that reflected the people who created them.

This website is my small attempt to recapture a little of that spirit.

You'll find projects here. Thoughts. Experiments. Things I'm building. Things I've learned. Things I've rediscovered from the early days of the web. Some posts will be useful. Some will probably only be interesting to me.

That's fine.

The internet could use a few more personal websites again.

So here's to Geocities, Netscape Navigator, IRC, Excite Search, terrible HTML, blinking text, and the wonderfully messy web that inspired a generation of us to start creating things online.

And with that...

Hello, world.