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I have had a Web site up at frankg.dgne.com for roughly 10 years. Back then, like any "home page" it was my repository for things I wanted to make available to the Internet community - my Perl script experiments and science-fiction creativity, mostly. (After all, that was how I spent my evenings after school - coding and geeking out!) Over time, I added other things like the photo section and minilog, which is still almost 5 years old as of this writing.
As time went on, I dove into spending time on other things - semiconductors, algorithms, physiology, the law. Anyone who knows me knows the metamorphases in mental and physical state I've undergone.
During that time, I didn't really notice the metamorphases that the Web was undergoing. I heard things about "Web 2.0" but thought it was just a buzzword. Hadn't things like blogs and personalized content been around for a long time? But now I understand that the "Web 2.0" concept has nothing to do with the underlying technologies; it's about how people are using what's available to them. A personal "home page" is now, essentially, a relic (except, perhaps, in academia).
What stands out to me is that the paradigm a decade ago was to have accounts on different commercial services like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy (remember those?). But as proprietary protocols gave way to TCP and HTTP, self-contained, structured systems gave way to the free-form canvas of the Web. And now, with "Web 2.0" that standard has returned, only replaced by things like Gmail, Facebook, and Wikipedia. I can't say the return of structure disappoints me, although it does leave independent experiments in custom content distribution, still hand-coded HTML and Perl, as merely a curiosity.
But, in the meantime, you can find me on Gmail, Facebook, or Wikipedia!
(Or, send me an email using the form below.)
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