I‘ve been maintaining this website for more than twenty years. The website‘s frontend, domain name and servers have changed over the year, but the oldest web pages still date back to as early as 1999.
Why? Because I see this website as my personal (public) archive. Its contents reflect my interests and personal developments over the past 20+ years.
Times (and technologies), they are a-changin’
Moving the site to a new hosting provider just a few months ago, I took some time to review all of the content in this space and rediscovered some old works. I also ran across some old works that didn’t work anymore, since some older (mostly PHP) legacy technologies are no longer supported.
Since I want to keep even the old stuff alive here, I dedicated some time to review legacy code works and adapt it carefully to make it work again.
I’m not really a coder. But in the beginning of my career, back at university, I discovered my interest in the technology side of design. Or better: I realized the necessity of some technical knowledge in order to build things. One of my key moments in the late 1990s/early 2000s was when I discovered how to let web visitors interact with my website directly by submitting text through form fields and saving these inputs into files on my server. This discovery was like magic for me – being able to build stuff to enable two-way-communication. This was well some years before the advent of Web 2.0 (remember Flickr?)…
With my rudimentary, self-taught coding skills (mostly HTML, JavaScript, PHP), I created some interactive web works over the years. Four of these works – pieces of legacy code with stories from the last decades – went live again after I fixed some legacy code issues:
1302
A very early work. Made with photographs I took with a good friend on one single day in 2001, it‘s about the power of images and associations. User generated content was used to enrich the photographs and to generate random image stories.
city
Even older – dating back to 1999/2000. A short walk through the city resulted in a virtual image-based city map that collects associations via user input. A recurring theme for me, back then.
9×9
A simple visual blog/diary, made from scanned 9×9 notepad scribbles. The scribbles are being displayed chronologically. Each new scribble I upload automatically adds to the diary.
Fiery Skies
A collection of sunrise/sunset photographs. The attempt to lift everyday snapshots into digital eternity. Scenery to go, to take width your smart device.