My back pages
By Marc Perton
Peter has added a “Sites I’ve started” section to the navbar of his blog. I like the idea and I started thinking about doing something similar here. Unfortunately, virtually all of the sites I’ve created have vanished into the cgi-bin of history. Most still resolve to something, but bear no resemblance to the sites I actually built. Finance.com goes to Citibank’s home page. AboutWork.com goes to a “temporarily unavailable” page. Ironically, the site with the most staying power turns out to be the first one I launched: Asia Inc Online, which is now in its 12th year of continuous operation. OK, it’s gone through a ton of owners, and it doesn’t seem to have been updated in about six months. But at least it’s still online, and still has something to do with Asia Inc magazine. That’s more than I can say for MediaCentral and ka-Ching, which have completely vanished. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive; even if I can’t find these sites anymore, at least there’s proof that they did exist at some point, and weren’t part of some boom-era fever dream (on the other hand, some of these old sites look like they were built in a fever dream, but that’s another story).
Peter has added a “Sites I’ve started” section to the navbar of his blog. I like the idea and I started thinking about doing something similar here. Unfortunately, virtually all of the sites I’ve created have vanished into the cgi-bin of history. Most still resolve to something, but bear no resemblance to the sites I actually built. Finance.com goes to Citibank’s home page. AboutWork.com goes to a “temporarily unavailable” page. Ironically, the site with the most staying power turns out to be the first one I launched: Asia Inc Online, which is now in its 12th year of continuous operation. OK, it’s gone through a ton of owners, and it doesn’t seem to have been updated in about six months. But at least it’s still online, and still has something to do with Asia Inc magazine. That’s more than I can say for MediaCentral and ka-Ching, which have completely vanished. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive; even if I can’t find these sites anymore, at least there’s proof that they did exist at some point, and weren’t part of some boom-era fever dream (on the other hand, some of these old sites look like they were built in a fever dream, but that’s another story).
