Reviving my first homepage – Jag Talon

Reviving my first homepage – Jag TalonSkip to the content

The other day I learned that there’s an archive of my very first homepage on the Wayback Machine!

I never thought I’d see this page again, and I don’t think 2006 me ever expected it to survive this long either. I just wish that it got to archive the Flickr photos, too. I was 15 at the time, and I was learning about Linux on a free shell account on anapnea.net. They happened to offer static web hosting as well, so I thought that it would be the coolest thing ever if I built my own homepage—especially since everyone else seemed to be on Friendster (the Myspace of Asia).

The auto-playing music is obnoxious and the multi-colored text is childish, but I was proud of this website. It was a way of showcasing my interests and I loved that I could do it outside the constraints of social media platforms. I learned how to use the command line, SSH into a server, and write some HTML to make this into a reality.

So I thought I could commemorate it by reviving it and giving it a proper place to live online.

I couldn’t find a clear way of downloading Wayback Machine archives, but I found this gem called Wayback Machine Downloader which did all of the work for me.

Most of the markup was generated by a tool called Nvu which was an open source clone of Adobe Dreamweaver. Back then I was big into open source software and I absolutely refused to use anything that’s proprietary. I also didn’t have the money to spend on software anyway.

But because the markup was automatically generated, things were smushed and hard to read. I thought I could at least clean it up before I uploaded the code to GitHub. Fortunately on VSCode you can easily fix it by pressing ⇧⌥F.

Wayback Machine wasn’t able to archive the Flickr photos that I embedded on the page so I had to swap them out with ones that I had taken recently. I hosted those on my Backblaze B2 bucket.

For hosting, I wanted the code to live on GitHub so the easiest way to host it was through GitHub Pages. I simply made a CNAME record on my DNS provider to point jagtalon.github.io to 2006.jagtalon.com. Done!

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The newly revived website.

Enjoy

Fair warning that music might automatically play when you visit 2006.jagtalon.com. Embedded music was all the rage back then, so 15-year-old me thought he’d embed some MP3s in there, too.