Site History

Beginnings

For my own interest I thought I'd document the history of this website as I've had it in operation more or less for nearly 25 years in one form or another.



The first iteration of this site I built in highschool, as a way to market my budding side hussle fixing computers. I had a donated Performa 5260 running MacHTTP on System 7.5.3. This must have been in my Grade 12 year as I had just learned how to do some HTML programming in my IT course and so I crafted that early page using notepad on my PC, testing the pages in IE and then shuttling the files over via floppy to the mac. We had a 1Mb DSL connection at home on a dynamic IP and so I decided to set up with dyndns.org to help me manage the IP changes. And so etech.dyndns.org was born.





Well life changes and so does technology, by 2004 I was living on my own and rented a basement suite with a fellow nerd who worked night shifts so he could game all day with his "clan". I was engaged and decided to build a wedding website that had some scanned photos of us as a happy couple as well as information for our wedding registries. I still used MacHTTP but now I had a PowerMac 7300 running OS 8.6. I had the server running on my desk right next to the head of my bed so I used the automatic startup and shutdown feature to turn the computer on at 5:00AM (the startup bong became my alarm clock) and scheduled shutdown at 11:00PM.



That 7300 moved with us when we got married to a new city and I switched the focus to become a hobby site, much like it is today, but quite different in design. I believe I had some photos of my collection which is still why my first tab is My Collection on the current site. I had a brief stint working at a web design firm where I learned my hosting method was antiquated. I added a second HDD to my 7300 and dual booted my old-world mac into Debian Etch and configured Apache for the first time. I could now program pages utilizing PHP, which I was teaching myself and I could SSH into the server and modify files directly now using nano. I had tried VIM but I found it frustrating.

Sometime prior to moving into our first non-rental, I picked up a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet) from a friend at work. It had a terrible passive matrix display but had a faster processor, more RAM and lower power requirements than my 7300. I quickly converted my site over to this machine and hid it in our laundry closet next to the router.



In retrospect, this machine actually lasted quite a long time as a host. I had it running from 2006 all the way to 2011. Sometime during this period, the bones of this current site took shape and the look and feel became much as it is today. You can see an early version of this site here on the Internet Archive

In 2011 I decided to move away from my PowerBook and switch my hosting to my hacked iMac DV. At this point I had a new job, and I ran the server atop my filing cabinet next to my desk at work. You can see the hack and server hosting away on my iMac DV on ATX page.



By 2015 I had switched machines again. I had received a SunFire V100 Server which I still have in my possession and decided to upgrade to a real server that was meant for hosting. By this point I was running Debian Squeeze, but shortly after this Debian stopped supporting the SPARC architecture in its official distro list so I abandoned it for a Raspberry Pi Zero. I believe sometime in 2016 dyndns.org finally started charging me for using their service. I made the hard decision to pull the plug and move my dynamic service over to ddns.net. For the last 10 years they've been good to me. Thanks guys. Don't change.



Today

You'll notice my philosophy to this point. In actuality my Raspberry Pi was the first device that I actually paid for in order to run my site, and further to that I never touched Intel hardware. This was largely due to the fact that Intel had the market majority and I just wanted to do something a bit different.

As of a few years ago I finally decided to virtualize my machine. My Raspberry Pi was running a little slower than I had liked and I had a number of other services that I was running on separate devices. Time to bring it together into a single box to save space and electricity. I'm being vague on details on purpose here but that's where we currently stand. It'll be interesting to see where the next 25 years takes me self hosting this page.

Things I've learned

It's interesting to think about what I've learned over the years. I've discovered that I'm not much good at web design, but I like the process of creating things. There's value in learning how to code a page from hand, and certainly freedom that I would never have in a Wordpress template.

Technically, I've learned PHP, CSS, Javascript and HTML, but since my interest is in old hardware, such as my Mac LC 475, I've learned the limitations of older browsers and how to optimize pages to render nicely with old machines.

In 25 years the internet has changed massively. My style of site used to be more common when I first started publishing. Not so anymore. If you've made it this far, thanks for hanging out with me, I'm still having fun.



Last Updated: February 15, 2026