Context and History (Aged 15) - Updated 2021

Dawid Joubert made this website as a hobby and space to track his portfolio. Born in 1989 Dawid would be aged 14 to 15 years old when this went online for the first time. It was infact the death of Geocities that ushered in his move over to private paid for web hosting. A shared host was available for peanuts ($5 per month or less) but you were severely limited in storage space, you had no shell access, you had to use the oldest version of PHP, and the built-in provided MySQL. These early hosts dictated what tools and software stack you would end up using.

This page is broken. From the source code I built a full fledged Blog site with "news" items and the ability to CRUD (Create, Replace, Update, Delete) items from it. The source code is all here but I am missing the MySQL database. Whilst I can backwards engineer the database structure from the source code unfortunately the actual content in those blog posts will be lost forever.

- KINDLY NOTE -

This page and associated content was made around the year 2004 to 2005. During this time the web was a completely different space, and by the time you read this it could be the year 2040 and websites no longer exists as pages or sites but as apps that feel native, and even doing a hover-over animation required some Javascript. The navigation above for example uses Javascript to swap out the image and create this 'hover over' effect.

Back then the web was super slow, most people had 56Kbits lines or ASDN lines (double 112Kbits) - note this is bits and not bytes. So all media had to be optimised for size, it was very common to save graphical images as GIFs with a reduced pallete set of 16 or fewer colours. Even worse you had to make sure to pre-load these hover overs because the web was slow, pings were slow, and you would generate 'broken images' if you just swapped out the image. So on this page a Javascript function is triggred on page load to pre-load the hover images.