I decided to revamp the look of my website this weekend, since I’d resolved to finally move to a new webhost as my hosting fee was coming due. I’ve recently become kind of obsessed with owls (random) so I decided to go with a fall-like owl theme. I couldn’t find any pre-made wordpress themes that fit the bill, so I found a theme and modified the heck out of it with the help of firebug and istockphoto. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I know that probably zero people will ever see it, but since I do this site for no one but myself, that’s A-OK with me. 
As it often happens when I revamp my site, I started to get all reminiscent about the beginnings of my blog. I visited the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org and typed in aliwolly.com. The earliest iteration that popped up was from December 2004 – my pink landing page, which linked out to my photo albums (the older ones were self-hosted) and my blogger blog. So that was fun to poke around in, but then I thought, “Huh. 2004? That’s the earliest?” Then I remembered that my original website was hosted on my PC and used dyndns.com to point a url to my PC’s IP. Yep, turns out I’ve been a geek for a long time. So I threw aliwolly.homeip.net into the wayback machine and found a version of my blog from 2002: pre-blogger. I probably originally built the site in Sept 2001 on tripod.com before I moved it to my PC. It’s completely intriguing that there’s this internet archive project out there and that something as insignificant as my website is archived in it. I guess, so far as websites go, mine could be considered pretty old – “online since 2001!” – but I can’t imagine that it’s interesting to anyone but me.
My old posts are endlessly fascinating to me. I decided to look back at October 2002 – I was pretty verbose that month with 42 posts! – and laughed my ass off reading my posts from 10/13/02. The first one relates a story about a Pizzaria Uno’s dining experience and me pulling a typical Ali move and speaking without thinking. Telling your waiter that your leftover pizza would “smell like ass” is apparently a good way to get it taken off the bill (and embarrass everyone you’re dining with). The second post is about the time that I learned the expression, “Soup to Nuts” in one of my grad school classes – but thought the prof said, “Soupy Nuts” and suppressed giggles ensued. Actually, the whole month of October that year has some pretty good posts – I wish I could get back to writing like that again. Lately work is just all-encompassing and I am so tired by the time I shake work out of my head that I just go to bed. Sigh. Speaking of… Goodnight!
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The Owl is cute. Your new site is very nice and I like reading your blog. I have not posted to mine in a long time. Maybe you could help me get a new look to ours some day.
Thanks!
I inadvertently gave your site a new look when I switched hosts for aliwolly.com, since I was hosting the background image and header file. I noticed it last night… I put you on one of the “standard” blogger themes for now, but would love to create something custom for you. 