January 1, 1995, 12:00 am
The term Blog wasn't coined until 1999 so obviously this blog (and indeed this blog post) have not existed since 1995. However, from some time in 1995 I have had a "Home Page" on the World Wide Web.
I wrote about games I was playing, development projects I was working on and posted 3D modelling experiments rendered in Bryce 3D (and it appears briefly in a copy of 3D Studio Max of dubious provenance).
This page was hosted for some period on the Basser Department of Computer Science servers and then a general Sydney University server. This impassioned request is probably the only remaining record of those two pages.
I remember being pretty excited about using image maps for everything and early versions of my Home Page made that excitement quite clear. Sadly, in 1995 my prefrontal cortex hadn't quite developed to the point that I kept good backups so those early pages (along with source code for all my early development projects) are lost to history (or perhaps residing on tape drive in the basement of the University of Sydney Computer Science department).
At some point I decided that rampant image maps weren't enough to distinguish my Internet presence and I created this thing as a Java Applet ("write once, run everywhere" or "write once, debug everywhere" depending on whether you worked for Sun Microsystems):
Here is a Javascript re-implementation of that applet based on the byte code that was still sitting on the Wayback Machine archive.
My rationale was that HTML at the time didn't give you any straightforward way to arrange linked buttons in a perfect circle, and my site would therefore impress prospective employers. After graduating I guess I could no longer host my home page on the university systems so, still not convinced by the value of a personal domain, my page was hosted on the sliver of web-hosting space my Internet Service Provider gave me as part of my dial-up plan.
This domain (exetel.com.au) was apparently not a destination link for many sites in the late 90s or early 2000s because my page wasn't picked up by the Wayback machine crawler until 2007, by which time I had registered this domain (cannonade.net) and moved my site there.
So my website had basically evolved from a place to demonstrate I was a programmer to something made for other humans on the Internet with the start of the Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project. That epic project led to lots of other fun projects that have kept my spare time interesting over the last 20 years or so (and probably made me more employable at the same time).
In an age of AI driven mediocrity I feel like creating novel things on the Internet is even more important for young developers attempting to differentiate themselves from their peers.
I highly recommend it.
Posted Sun Sep 06 15:09:24 AEST 2026
Permalink - Tags: Misc,Development