The History of AndrewKnight.com
I registered andrewknight.com on November 5th 1998. I was in my junior year at Boston College and decided that it would be fun to have my own domain name. I had also started learning about web development so this was a natural progression of that learning. In addition to having a website, I also thought it would be cool to have my own email address on my resume! This proved to be a very good strategy as almost every interviewer was curious about the andrewknight.com email address that I used. Back in 1998 a personal email address like this was very uncommon!
Version 1: “The Original”
It was not long after I registered andrewknight.com that I published my first site using Microsoft FrontPage. I recently found the original code to the site and for nostalgia purposes it is now archived here. If you are a fan of late 90’s personal homepages this site is a throwback to those early days.
Version 2: “Dreamweaver”
After playing around with FrontPage a new piece of software came along called Macromedia Dreamweaver. While FrontPage was a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver was a big upgrade over FrontPage. It had a much better user interface and most importantly it an improved HTML engine that output much cleaner HTML. I redesigned the site but never got around to building any content as my senior year job search and classes took up most of my time.
Version 3: “Blue Dot”
After graduating in May of 2000, I started working as a technology consultant for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). This is where my web development career began and on January 17th 2001 I relaunched andrewknight.com with a new logo and design. This new site was also the first time I had switched from simple client side HTML to some very basic server side scripting using SHTML. Using server side includes was a revelation for me as a site could now be built with templates for easy updates to things like the header, footer, and navigation. I had high aspirations of keeping some content on the site but that quickly fizzled out when I took a new job at Burton Snowboards.
Version 4: “Busy at Work”
By the Summer of 2004, I had been doing a lot of cycling and combined with a full time web development job my personal site was not getting any attention. I had not updated it in a few years so I took the site down and replaced it with a simple splash page.
Version 5: “AK Consulting”
In the Spring of 2005, I launched a web development consulting business along side my day job as the Web Development Manager for Gardeners.com. While most of my web work at Gardeners.com was in Classic ASP, I had started learning and using Microsoft’s new web architecture ASP.NET and C#. The original AK Consulting site was implemented in ASP.NET but in 2007 I converted it to PHP so it could run alongside the WordPress site below.
Version 6: “WordPress”
On February 17th, 2007 I relaunched the site as a WordPress Blog with my First Post using the default WordPress theme and hosted by Dreamhost. Later that year, I updated the WordPress theme to “K2” and moved the site hosting to Steadfast.net. The site continued to use “K2” until 2009 when I updated to the iNove Theme.
In 2010 Stedfast.net sold its shared hosting business and the site was migrated to Fluid Hosting in 2011. Fluid was never as good as Steadfast, so in 2014 I started looking for a new host and settled on BigScoots.com where the site is hosted today. When I migrated to BigScoots I also updated the theme to use the current TwentTwenty Theme. Over the years, I have experimented with some different themes along the way but the content has largely stayed the same. I had high aspirations of regular blogging back in 2007 but life got in the way and it never happened!
In 2020, I have now started a project to retroactively go back and post key milestones and personal events in my life. My SmugMug site has chronicled the years in photos but I would like to compliment the photos with some content on the site. We will see if I can incorporate some real time posts in addition to some of the historical posts!
The Internet Archive is a great resource for going back in time. Unfortunately the Internet Archive spiders did not do a great job of capturing the site so that is why I setup archive.andrewknight.com. All the sites above can be viewed using the following links:
http://archive.andrewknight.com/v1/
http://archive.andrewknight.com/v2/
http://archive.andrewknight.com/v3/
http://archive.andrewknight.com/v4/
http://archive.andrewknight.com/v5/
You can also view all the Internet Archives for andrewknight.com here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/andrewknight.com
Additional Sites
I also have the following personal projects archived on this server at archive.andrewknight.com
