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The Internet is a strange beast: it can horde information from millions of sources and store them potentially forever. On the other hand, it can also be strangely ephemeral; once a page has been updated then the old version is lost forever. That’s pretty much what happened to Back Yard.
It’s rather scary to realise that the original Back Yard was first published in 1997, which I think makes it older than Google. It was my second attempt at a website, after the frighteningly dull PC-1 which purported to be about computery things, but was actually just a whole heap of tedium dressed up in HTML form. Back Yard was intended to be a repository for random, vaguely amusing thoughts and was pretty much a ‘blog’ before the term had really become a common term. It lasted a couple of years and, though it would be a complete lie to say that it was ever popular in the traditional sense of the word, it did have a few regular readers.
For reasons that escape me now, it died a death around about the time I started university for the first time, and though it languished on the CompuServe (remember them?) servers for quite some time, nothing was ever done with it. In 2003 I set up a new website, CityOfOxbury.co.uk, that existed until just last year, though was only updated sporadically after 2005.
Then, finally, last year Back Yard was resurrected from the ashes as a WordPress-based site. As mentioned in my last post, I was never truly happy with this and it was never really publicised so few people ever saw it. Following much (well, some) thought and a lot (a tiny bit) of planning, this, the new new Back Yard was born. Hoo and, indeed, rah.
Whilst in the process of working out what should be in the new Back Yard I decided to take a look at the old version. Unfortunately my old copies of the site appear to lost or, at the very least. stuck on an old floppy disk somewhere, probably in a dusty box buried beneath a thousand unused AOL CDs. Luckily, thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Engine I’ve been able to salvage a version of the old site, and have made it available on the new site for the purposes of posterity. If you feel so inclined, you can see it here. Unfortunately the Wayback Engine hasn’t been able to trap everything, so some things – like old episodes of Doctor Who will have to remain lost.
Reading through it reveals that I appear to have been just as pompous and ill-informed back when I was 16-18 as I am now, which is an achievement of some sorts, I guess. It would seem that I spent an inordinate amount of time between 1997 and 1999 fixing my computer, and indeed I do remember having a fair few arguments with the horrors of Internet Explorer 8. The design of the site is rather hideous, it must be said, and uses frames, if you can just about remember what they are (there’s also font tags all over the place, but the less said about them the better).
I also can’t believe I called her Jenny Ryan. What an idiot I was.
