On the 18th July 2000 I registered the domain hyperlands.net. It took a while for me to get the site live, so it was probably early 2001 that the first page appear here
Since the site has changed so much I thought it would be fun to look back in time at the various front pages this site has had. Sadly I’ve lost the files for the original version of this site in a hard drive formatting…er incident!
Hyperlands 1
Hyperlands 1 was basic and sadly I don’t have the files any more, so no screen shot! I didn’t know much about html and it was the late 90′s so layout (such as it was) was done with tables (hand crafted). I had a 3 by 3 table filling the screen width. In the center square of each side I the link to one of the sections of the site. If I recall correctly the sections where @90 degrees to reality, lightpath gallery, digital anthill and jumpgate.
Hyperlands 2
Some time between Hyperlands 1 and 2 I discovered Macromedia Fireworks. Hence the site still relied on tables for layout, but things where a lot more complex because of Fireworks, which at the time I through was fantastic! The problem with this is shown in the screen shot. In a modern browser (Camino on a mac), you get rendering errors and the precise alignment of the tables needed to get the images to fit doesn’t always work out. Worse still I took some images out the table and put text in there place. This would look awful if some one where to use a larger than normal font setting in their browser. We also gained two new sections world view (now defunct) and buffers guide (likewise defunct).
Hyperlands 3
Time moves on and Hyperlands changes again. This time nearly all of the content of the form Hyperlands, was moved to my (then) new site Cool-aardvark (it’s still mine, but seems to have drifted off to an alternate universe, filled with ant eating mega rock stars!) . Design wise big changes also, but ‘under the hood’ very little change. Still table based layout, still done with Fireworks (which was fading rapidly in my eyes at this point). More hand tweaking of the html was done, which made me wonder why I was using fireworks to generate the html in the first place! The cult archives was home to bits from the buffers guide and some other episode guides for other shows. None of these episode guides where completed (most never even got more than a holding page). Patchwork universe was a totally still born idea, that I’d rather forget (so you wont get any more from me on it!).
Hyperlands 4
More changes. More web sites. As you can see from the link on the page, I now (then!?) had 5 web sites. Hyperlands therefore became my portal. The amount of content I had to on these pages didn’t, however increase. So I now had the content (which mostly incomplete anyway) spread very thinly. In some cases (geek station), there was no content, only a front page. A few extra pages got added mainly about me, which I’m sure no one ever looked at! Under the hood, the layout was still table based and created by Fireworks, but with lots more hand coded stuff. Towards the end I did try reproducing a similar layout using css manually, it didn’t work out well, hence…
Hyperlands 5
This site was the first template based site I’ve done. I used a design called DarkFusion from Openwebdesign. The template was great, but the problem was since it was just a an HTML page, if I wanted to change the menu structure or re-arange a page, I had to do it manually in each page. A real pain. Also note that most of the content on this page hasn’t changed in years! A problem which I to put to bed for good with…
