A Zoid and Stuff

In which I post screenshots of almost every iteration of this site, all the way back to the beginning of time.

• 1995–96
  
  The only thing this is missing is a “best viewed in Netscape” button. And content. But hey, this was the second Zoids site ever. (The first one was a 1995 user page on teleport.com that was gone shortly after. As you can see, I have been using some variation of that background image (from Techno Zoids boxes) since the beginning!

  Note: In 1995, this site was on AOL (my cat signed up for lots of “free hours”). Later, I moved it to a local isp that gave me a whole megabyte of storage (hence the “I quit” splash).

• 1997
  
  In which I discover animated gifs. Also, my first plastic swap (an all silver Merda)! I didn’t have a camera at the time, so I just shooped it, and provided shooping instructions.
• 1998
  
  I got burned out on inter-nets.
• 2000–01
  
  I had a nifty ascii-art splash page, even though splash pages are stupid and annoying and useless. The 2000 subpage header was a bad shoop of Death Saurer about to destroy Atlanta, because I lived there at the time, and hated it. The 2001 one is something else, because I moved away. On both, the bad posterization effect was intentional. Trying to make bad photos look less bad doesn’t always work (#instagram, #hashtagsdontworkonblogs).
• 2003
  
  I tried a different color scheme. That’s about it. The new header image was a black and white scan from the manual that I colorized in Photoshop. For all that work, it just ended up looking like a scan of the box art with the colors not as saturated.
• 2006 (or thereabouts)
  
  Still blue, but starting to look like the current layouts. First appearance of the random corner image. I also started trying to arrange things into categories. By hand. I made each entry a separate text file, and then used virtual includes on each of the category pages. It was a pain. During this time I had an “old designs” page, which I forgot to restore until now.
• 2007–08
  
  The last pre-Wordpress site, and the first appearance of the “Gustav carrying Smeat” banner (since I got a real can around this time). Also around this time, “lightbox” style scripts were invented, so I could finally ditch that custom popup script I’d been using for images since 2000. It was pretty nice, all conforming to the image size and having a loading status, and even a title, but UGH I HATE POPUPS. I had a bunch of other silly javascript stuff in this design too. The top menu always stayed at the top, and a “go back to top” link always stayed in the lower right corner. I was also into showing and hiding blocks of text for some reason.
• May, 2008–January, 2012
  
  So I thought I’d learn how to do a site in WordPress. I spent too much time trying to get things to work to mess with the design.
• January, 2012–??
  You’re soaking in it!