I was recently surfing the web, when, for no reason at all, I wondered if I could find a copy of my very first website. Over the years, I have been through numerous sites, designs, platforms, topics, you name it, I’ve probably tried it. In fact, I can’t even remember all the places that I stuffed web pages – trust me, I tried. I do, however, remember the very first site that I produced, way back around 1997, not too long after I got online (which was sometime in 1996). This rudimentary site was hosted with AT&T’s personal web site service – I even remember the URL (it’s long gone) and lovingly crafted with Notepad.

I wondered if there might happen to be any web archives of my old site (you know, for posterity’s sake), and upon typing the URL into Google, promptly ran across this entry in someone’s guest book (remember those, back before we all had blogs and comments?).

Name: Matthew Smith
E-mail address: jimje@worldnet.att.net
Homepage URL: http://home.att.net/~jimje/
Comments: Great programs, cool site, VERY fast (_-ZOOM_-) Like Hi-color, cool apps very much. It is very good to see HI quality apps for free. I was wondering if there is any way to mack paquet builder add icons to start menu ? Also, what about the site ratings that don’t belong here ?(makes message that the rating for this site belongs to somewhere else) Great job ! Matthew Smith [removed link and missing image]
Monday, February 9th 1998 – 11:59:00 AM

Amazing – I have no clue what I’m talking about (it was the guest book for some software programmer), I sound retarded, and, wait – was that posted at lunch time on a SCHOOL DAY? Yes, it was – that’s the joy of home schooling!

At any rate, I hereby challenge you (assuming you’re not completely new to this whole “internet” fad) to hit Google or your favorite search engine and see what bits and bytes you can dig up on yourself. Hey, its fun – and you never know what you might find! If it’s interesting, I’d love to know – leave a comment or trackback from your blog entry!