contents/articles/twenty-years.md
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----- id: twenty-years title: "This web site is 20 years old" subtitle: "On March 28th, 2004, H3RALD.com was born" content-type: article timestamp: 1711609200 ----- Exactly twenty years ago today, on March 28th, 2004, I decided to purchase my first Internet domain. The .com bubble had already burst years earlier, and I remember wondering which domain name I should go for. After a few minutes I went for *h3rald.com*, the Internet handle I was using on a few web sites. The origin of the name H3RALD is nothing too glamorous really: when I moved my first steps on the Internet a few years earlier (my parents were kind of against computers and we had our first one in 1998, when I was in high school) I came across the *Hacker Manifesto*, which was signed *The Hobbit*. I remember dreaming about writing something as impactful as that someday, and signing it with an equally cool pseudonym. At the time, I used to purchase the International Herald Tribune every so often from the local newsagent, mainly because it was one of the few foreign newspapers I could get here in Italy, and I wanted to practice my English. Obviously, a handle like *herald* was taken on most web sites, so I decided to add a sparkle of *1337 speak* to it, hence *h3rald*. ### The early years One thing is buying a domain, another thing is actually using it for something useful. For the first year or so, the purpose of *h3rald.com* remained uncertain: I started off with a very simple HTML page with some interactive content mainly in the form of Java applets (news tickers and other pointless things like that) with a sprinkle of JavaScript. I barely knew how to program back then, and even though I was studying IT Engineering at the university here in Genoa, that [doesn't mean it was actually useful](/articles/academic), for anything practical. The first [few versions](/h3rald/) of this web site were various rather poor attempts at finding my nice. At one point I got as bold as trying to establish a web design studio (_H3RALD Labs_) with a very, _very_ basic web site. I taught myself PHP, I started using early frameworks like Prado, and most importantly I kept learning new things. I was doing all this on a 300MHz Pentium II machine that struggled to run Windows XP. When my parents first bought the thing back in '98 it felt much, much faster... I couldn't believe that after only a few years it was becoming obsolete! But that didn't stop me from discovering Linux (distributions like Mandrake, Slackware and Debian) and configuring it in dual boot (my dad was also using the computer, and I couldn't really mess things up too much). Now picture this, in 2004, at least in Italy: - There was no Facebook - MySpace was a thing, but geared at a younger audience - There were no iPhones, no apps - Mobile browsing meant largely accessing a bunch of crappy [WAP](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) sites - Dial-up was still the most common way to connect to the Internet - There was no StackOverflow. If you had questions about programming, you had to spend hours looking in specialized forums and communities At the time, I was part of an online community called CyberArmy. The domain shifted a couple of times from [cyberarmy.com](https://www.cyberarmy.com) (still up, but basically dead) to cyberarmy.net (long story...) and vice-versa, and no, it was nothing related to cyber terrorism, it was... well, just a bunch of people organized in groups (_brigades_) that aimed at learning more about the Internet and technology; a community of _hackers_ in the original meaning of the word. In CyberArmy, in the beginning people earned their rank by completing hacking challenges, and then by contributing to brigades. At one time, I became the C/O of the group that was curating the community online magazine, zZine.org (domain is dead now). zZine was the first outlet for my articles, some of which I have re-published here. Back then, I started writing about the things I was learning about, like [easy-to-install server packages](/articles/server-packages), or cutting-edge technologies like [BluRay vs HD-DVD](/articles/next-generation-dvds). Lightweight markup languages like markdown didn't exist at the time, so all I wrote all those early articles using [BBCode](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode), before [switching to textile](/articles/18). ### A look back at early 2000s technologies and services It is funny to look back and read those early 2000s articles now. Do you remember when [social bookmarking services](/articles/social-bookmarking-services) were a thing? Del.icio.us? Maybe. What about Spurl, Furl, Blinklist... ring a bell? No? It turns out I was very fond of [ma.gnolia](/articles/magnolia) when it came out. I reviewed a few[Web 2.0](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0)-era services like [NetVibes](/articles/39) and [JournoTwit](/articles/journotwit-review), tools like [Komodo Edit](/articles/komodo-edit-review), web frameworks like [Akelos](/articles/34/) or [Lithium](/articles/getting-started-with-lithium). Even really cool things like [Wunderlist](/articles/wunderlist) got acquired and eventually killed off. But luckily some things were built to last: - [AJAX](/articles/what-is-ajax) may not be called that anymore (and we may have most definitely dropped the XML part), but it laid the foundation of modern JavaScript. - [Git](/articles/git-for-the-locals) is now the de-facto version control system. - [SQLite](/articles/quick-overview-of-sqlite) is very widely-used and respected. ### Browser War II This topic deserves its own section. Nowadays, even though some would say that the wars are now over and Google Chrome won, the reality is that for good and for bad Google's creation and all its Blink brothers have the lion share of the market. Sure, Firefox is alive and (mostly) well, but things are much easier for web developers and more pleasant for users now than they were in the early 2000s. Trust me, I was there. I lived and fought what history now calls [the second browser war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars) and quite a few pages on this web site are a testament to those hard but glorious times when developing a web site meant trying it out in *at least* three or four different browsers (each with its own engine) to make sure it looked right. Being a Windows XP user at the time, I took advantage of the beta period in which Microsoft let users test Internet Explorer 7. Yes, I did write a [pre-review of IE7](/articles/pre-review-of-ie7) in 2005. That thing introduced support for cutting edge things like tabs, transparent PNGs, and even *partial* CSS2 support! Crazy stuff. IE was very prevalent back then also because, as a web developer, you could not afford to ignore it: if your site had to support IE (and a lot of sites sadly only supported IE), you kinda had to use it as well. Nonetheless, I remember spending a considerable amount of time looking for [the perfect browser](articles/perfect-browser). Firefox was Heaven though. I mean really, it was, compared to the competition. But most people didn't understand, so I ended up putting myself in their shoes and wrote [an IE lover's guide to Firefox](/articles/ie-lovers-guide-to-firefox) to educate the masses (including my family) that there was a better, faster, and more pleasant way to browse the web. I even reviewed preliminary versions like the one that was codenamed [Deer Park](/articles/from-firefox-to-deer-park), i.e. version 1.1 of the popular Mozilla browser. Fast-forward three years later, and I found myself deeply involved in the Firefox 3 released. SitePoint published a very in-depth article of mine that was also realesed as a 30-page PDF ebook: [Firefox 3 revealed](/articles/firefox3-revealed) (you can now download [right here](/files/ff3-revealed) if you want). To this day, although largely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, I consider that mini book a personal jewel of mine, and the closest thing I ever had to get a book published (more on that later). After the Firefox years, my attention slowly shifted to [Opera](/articles/thoughts-on-firefox3-and-opera95) (the real thing with its own browser engine, _Presto_, not the Chromium-based bad copy we have today) and I finally published [a Firefox lover guide to Opera](articles/firefox-lovers-guide-to-opera) to get more people to switch. But in the end Google did it. When the big G released Google Chrome in September 2008, it really _felt_ like things were over. Like with all the greatest product of our time (when Steve Jobs released the first iPhone I had the exact same feeling), a company took an old idea (a browser with tabs) and an "old" engine (WebKit) and turned into something new. A multi-process browser, something never done before. I [reported the birth of Chrome](articles/google-chrome) from my humble web site that day, still not quite sure if that was going to be just a phase, just another meteor of a product that was doomed to be forgotten. It was not. ### CakePHP CakePHP - /articles/cakephp - /articles/cakephp-first-bite (sitepoint) - /articles/40 (book intro) - /articles/42 (book canceled) - /articles/43 (too many cooks) - /articles/too-many-cooks-take-2/ - /articles/too-many-cooks-take-3 - /articles/rails-inspired-php-frameworks/ - /articles/25 (digg effect) Technology & random stuff - - /articles/ - /articles/google-apps-for-your-domain - /articles/tweaking-windows-explorer - /articles/the-internet-philosopher Reviews - - - netvibes - akelos framework - /articles/38 akelos details - - /articles/textlinkads_sidebar_v01 - - - Personal - - /articles/20 (vittorio cevasco) - /articles/12 (job) - /articles/9 (riddle job) - /articles/36 (world cup) - /articles/incomplete-guide-to-london - /articles/11-07-2009 Ruby - /articles/introducing-redbook - /articles/10-reasons-to-learn-ruby - /articles/hlrb-review - /articles/the-rails-way-review - /articles/the-rails3-way-review Recent articles - /articles/10-reasons-why-i-didnt-update-my-blog - /articles/10-programming-languages - /articles/randal-schwartz - /articles/10-more-programming-languages Nim - /articles/hastyscribe - /articles/hastysite - /articles/litestore - /articles/h3 |