My First Blog

Looking back to my almost first ever website build for Blaugust.

I first decided that it would be useful to have my own website at the beginning of 2004 when I started heading out into the mountains with West Bromwich Mountaineering Club. I wrote my first post about a walk in the snow up Raise, near Helvellyn, from Patterdale in the Lake District in February of that year. I can still remember the small of the sausages cooking in the Helvellyn YHA as we walked past that morning.

You can still read my very first entry on this site right here.

I spent the next 8 months messing around with various free hosting providers, who were prevalent at the time, but vanished just as quickly, before obtaining my lee-perry.co.uk domain and buying my first hosting plan from macoman, who became Ariotek before later being procured by Krystal.io when their server architecture began to fail. I have had spells hosting my own server and on site ground before heading back to Krystal probably around 8 years ago.

Prior to buying the domain there also used to be a free .co.nr registrar who I had registered lee-perry.co.nr with, but thankfully no images of that design persisted into the Wayback Machine! I seem to remember writing pages of html and css, with garish granite backed image buttons for navigation.

On 19 December 2004 I uploaded a site that I had built using a gallery generator. The software set galleries into an html framework that I had built, with a number of hand rolled front and index pages, and obviously mountain lists for ticking hills on. Despite its clear agedness now, the design persisted quite well, and remained on the site for around 4 years before I began experimenting with Joomla. Though mobile responsively was not a thing back then, I seem to be able to remember being able to look at this site quite well in a mobile phone browser at mountaineering club evenings at the Globe in Reform Street, West Bromwich.

I used to spend hours poring over photographs and writing what today would just be alt-text. Somewhere I still have a full copy of this four years of my online life, that will still have all of those descriptions.

Not quite my first design then, but the earliest that I can lay my hands on. I didn't miss having to manually update and move the four cards on the right of the homepage each time I update the site and, as you did back in 2004, uploaded it to my hosting via FTP. These things go full circle, again pushing design updates to my hosting using FileZilla again now - but at least Pure Blog produces my site dynamically on the server.

After a couple decades of explaining what a hyphen was, I shortened my domain name to prry.uk this year, having consolidated all of my various projects into it. lee-perry.co.uk will be reborn shortly as my profile page on omg.lol.