Some days ago, while I was hacking (which by the way simply means “to devise or modify a computer program, usually skillfully”) the code of the theme I use on this site, I started to think about how much time it passed since my first appearance on the Internet and how my website evolved.
I started connecting to the Internet in 1995 with a U.S. Robotics 28.800bps modem, paid through the nose. I used the nickname Nemo, which turned out to be a poor choice very soon.
I created my first home page in 1997. It was hosted on a web space of my local Internet provider, and contained just some pictures as well as some script that I was finding here and there on the web—like the windows bombing script which triggered the opening of an infinite number of pop-up windows and which was attached to a button conveniently labelled “Don’t click”. You can imagine how many people sent me to hell because of that joke. 🙂
Unfortunately, the nickname Nemo was widely used, and the corresponding username was already taken in most free services on the web. So in 2001, I decided to change nickname to Aronnax, which is also one of the characters from the book “Vingt mille lieues sous le mers” (20000 Leagues Under the Sea) by Jules Verne. Aronnax starts with AR, like my initials, and ends with X, like Unix or Linux, something that made it particularly interesting.
In 2001 I also refreshed my home page, giving it a more personal touch. The new home page contained my first coding experiments made at the University, and the theme was inspired by Apple’s new website.
In 2002 I registered the aronnax.it domain. The home page slowly became like a portal dedicated to GNU/Linux. The content management system was developed by Graziano Liberati and me, while the contents themselves were edited by me only.
In 2003 I also registered the alessandrorossini.it domain. The new home page contained just my short biography and curriculum vitæ—in other words, the kind of home page that you use when you wish to increase your visibility on the web—and the theme was taken from the Open Source Web Design portal.
The versions that went from 2004 to 2007 were not so different in terms of contents but in terms of theme.
The last version is the one you are looking at now. I switched to WordPress, and I will use it to write this blog from now on. I also though that alessandrorossini.it was too Italian, so I registered the alessandrorossini.org domain.
In the end, more than ten years passed since my first home page. Am I becoming old perhaps? 🙂
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