Thirty Years of This Website: From a USF Server to Today

I have had this website, in one form or another, since the mid-1990s — back when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. It began not as a “website” at all but as files on a university server while I was a student at USF. By 2003 I was already calling the site’s design “the fifth rendition of the original,” and it has been through many more since.

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I can actually see those old designs again. So here is a walk through three decades of this little corner of the web — from a student account in Tampa, through half a dozen redesigns, a few years when I lost the domain entirely, and back again.

1999 — a page on a university server

www.csee.usf.edu/~birla, circa 1999 — hand-written HTML on a University of South Florida engineering server. (A couple of the decorative GIFs didn’t survive in the archive.)

Before there was a domain, there was a student account. This lived at www.csee.usf.edu/~birla, with a matching email at [email protected]. In my own words at the time:

Hello there… welcome to my home on the web. This page is sitting on an Engineering server at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. I finished my undergrad last May and have started my Masters… I also like to build model rockets and shoot them off, never to see them again… Bye bye, and enjoy surfing the web. I am off to discover strange new lands!

The same account also hosted my imagepro/ folder — image-processing coursework (Gaussian blurs, edge detectors, Hough transforms) that became the seed of the ImagePro software still on this site today. By 2001 this URL simply redirected to my new domain. (Add a memory here: what did it feel like to publish your first page to the web?)

2000 — “begin exploring…”

SumitBirla.com, 2000 — hand-built HTML, a Wile E. Coyote train graphic, and a bigfoot.com email address.

The earliest capture the archive has of the domain. This was a personal home page in the truest late-‘90s sense: a place to browse and download the software I had written, list my hobbies (model rockets, home automation with Linux and X10, astronomy, photography), and say hello. Note the email address — [email protected]. (Add a memory here: what were you using to build these pages back then?)

2002–2004 — “What’s New?”

2002 — a table-based layout with a sidebar, a ‘What’s New?’ feed, a ‘Picture of the Day,’ and ‘In the news’ / ‘Recent Clicks’ columns.

This is the era that looks most like a proper personal site. A left sidebar (Profile & Bio, Projects, Favorites), a reverse-chronological “What’s New?” feed — essentially a blog before I called it one — and little flourishes like a Picture of the Day and a hand-curated “Recent Clicks” list. This is also where the Canon D30 review and the early travelogues first appeared.

2005–2008 — the redesign

2006 — a cleaner PHP-driven design with a photographic header and a ‘Site Navigation’ sidebar.

A more grown-up look: a photographic banner (that’s the I-4/I-275 “malfunction junction” I used to complain about), a slim navigation bar, and a tidy Site Navigation sidebar. Under the hood this was the hand-rolled PHP site I only recently finished migrating into the current setup.

2012–2017 — the WordPress years

2014 — ‘Various happenings in my mind and life.’ The WordPress era, complete with categories, a blogroll, and social icons.

Eventually I did what almost everyone did and moved to WordPress. Social icons, categories, a blogroll, “random photos” in the sidebar — very much of its time. Most of the long-form technical posts still on the site today (the caching image server, swimming pool chemistry, the OpenSIPS write-ups) were written in this period.

2018–2024 — the lost years

2022 — someone else’s asking price for my own name: $3,420.

And then I lost the domain. Life got busy, a renewal slipped, and sumitbirla.com was snapped up the moment it lapsed. For several years the Wayback Machine shows it as a parking page full of “sponsored listings,” and later a domain-broker landing page offering my own name back to me for $3,420 (or a convenient $114/month). For a while it even redirected to unrelated junk. It is a strange feeling to watch the address you have used since your twenties turn into someone else’s billboard. (Add the story here: how did you eventually get it back?)

2025–present — reclaimed

Today — a fast, static, tracker-free site built with Jekyll.

I finally got the domain back and decided to rebuild from scratch — this time as a static site generated with Jekyll. No database, no plugins to patch, no trackers, system fonts, and client-side search. It loads instantly and should be readable for another thirty years without much fuss. I also spent a good while dragging the old content forward out of the FTP/PHP/WordPress eras so nothing got left behind in the move.

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Thirty years, half a dozen redesigns, one multi-year detour through the domain resale market, and the same person tinkering behind all of it. If you have kept a website going for a long time, go pull it up in the Wayback Machine — it is a wonderful, slightly embarrassing time capsule.