Billreid.net is a personal website, concerned mostly with the person of me.

I've had a website going since the very early 90s.  You can even find a few of them on the wayback machine, starting here or here.  I've also managed to save a few small thumbnails of some previous site designs along the way.

This is the very first one, circa 1994 and hosted on my dialup account's webspace. Pretty snazzy for the day, with transparent GIFs, background images and table-based columns.  Difficult to see here really, but there's a psychedelic fractal background going on there and a tie-dye colored logo as well. Note that it's "Bill and Renee's Website".  The first few versions had both our names attached to it, but Renee never really contributed any content, so this gradually went away. It was roughly just 4 or 5 very basic pages - resume, some photos, etc.  Your basic beginner's site.

This very quickly progressed to a more graphics heavy site. I loved to play with Photoshop, so it was not unusual to have a completely different design for every page of the site.  The content began to fill up a bit as well, adding pages to feature my shareware/freeware, code samples, art, music and rants.  Even a little Java arcade when those things were so popular.

                             

Remember when there were hundreds of little award sites out there choosing a "Site of the Day" or "Best of the Web" or what have you?  Seems like every site had an awards page...

Java applets figured heavily in most of these - public bits of code that I tabled into the design.  I really loved this one - the 3d cube rotated by itself above the platform - clicking it took you to the appropriate gallery.  This is from around 95 or 96, I think.

Eventually I began playing with more interactive elements - hand coded CMSs first in Perl, then ASP and later PHP.  This one was heavily Enlightenment influenced and randomly chose a different background on every page load.  It also pulled a random quip from a cookie file to display and kept a running total of recent updates at the bottom. Had an administrative backend as well - see the lock in the left toolbar?

This one used a ton of Javascript rollovers to attempt to look like a Flash movie.  As you moved over the "planted" guitars the hand would show up to pluck them and change a few informational elements here and there.

This frightfully ugly contraption was built around a neato Java applet that scrolled thumbnails and a text description around an invisible cylinder, so I built the machine interface around it...

And when my freeware apps got to be more popular, I built a little system to track versions, downloads, page views and the like.

Eventually the excess became just a little much and I moved back to basics.  The web was changing and I had accounts scattered everywhere - why not let them host everything?  My personal site got scaled back to just a few pages with links in every direction.

I caught the blogging fever around 2005 and went through LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress.  Nothing really special, although I did spend enough time on Wordpress to build a couple of custom themes.

The current site is on the Joomla framework because I kept running into limitations on Wordpress in terms of site structure and the like.  I built a couple of versions of CMS-worthy templates that fit the bill, but the backend was just never supportive. Plus, I already knew Joomla intimately from previous web design jobs and it seemed silly to reinvent the wheel.

And for a number of years before my alma mater had an alumni website, I maintained a public database of contact information.  It actually started out as just a list of my own buddies, but it caught on and got up to about 300-400 members, so I coded a Perl app to allow people to maintain their own info.

So that's site history in a nutshell.  "What a long, strange trip it's been..."