Way back in 2001, not long after buying our first PC, I experimented with online publishing.  I’d bought some computer magazines to learn about that Windows 98 beige box and came across an article about Homestead.com  The site allowed you to create your very own web page, with a primitive drag and drop interface, for free.  Wow, I could create my own page on the internet, how exciting!

I started dreaming about what I could do with my own web page (like I still do with the sites I publish now), but first I had to learn by experimenting.  I needed some photos, so I scanned pictures I had from when a tree landed on my wife’s car a few years earlier (yes, I had to scan photos because we didn’t even have a digital camera at that stage (that came in 2003).  A few hours later I’d made a web page called “Tree On Car”.

I’d forgotten all about my Tree On Car page, until I recently came across an old link on my very first Blogger blog.  The Homestead.com service still exists (competing with the likes of Squarespace and Wix), but my page had been disabled.  I decided to have a look at the Internet Wayback Machine, a site that archives web pages for future reference, to see if I could find anything.

The Wayback Machine didn’t have the Tree-On-Car website archived, but it did have the images.  I’m not sure why the photos were archived, but not the site, but that’s okay because those scanned photos were lost a couple of computers ago.

I think it’s pretty amazing when some hunting around on the internet can find things thought long lost!

By the way, we try not to park under trees these days!