History
After nursing the Vomitorium (my first page, which I created in early 1995) along for four years, I began to notice the Internet was changing. More people were creating web pages of their own, and the fact of the matter is that they were pretty lackluster. I decided that it was time to create a new page that would go above and beyond the call of duty of any personal web page. Thus the Heart of Darkness was created.
The name Heart of Darkness comes from the famous novel by Joseph Conrad, which was also the inspiration for the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. The first incantation of HOD was devoted to education. It was to be a page for students by a student. HOD2 was to be an extension of the HOD project. The squared was because it was an extension of the page and because the two pages ran simultaneously (I did realise that, from a mathematical standpoint, this doesn't make sense. But you have to admit that it sounds pretty cool). The project was huge and there was no way I'd be able to keep up with it, so I scrapped the idea.
In late 1999, HOD2 returned to the idea on which the Vomitorium was founded. HOD2 was designed to give people a glimpse of who I am. It was a virtual biography, of sorts.
In 2001, A Life Less Ordinary was started. The general idea behind the site was originally to be strictly a photo diary of my life with no explanation offered to visitors. The first photo taken for the site was of my ex-girlfriend and I. The picture was taken at 12:02:45 on 14 July 2001. I took the idea of a photo diary and expanded it to include video projects, audio clips, my webcam, and so on.
2002 saw HOD2 version 4. A much simpler version of the site, version 4 had a mere 10 (main) pages. Despite this, the site did not work technically and was officially closed on 1 June 2002. A Life Less Ordinary then combined with HOD2 to form a single, singular personal web page. By its three year anniversary in July 2004, version 2 of ALLO contained over 1000 diary images.
2004 brought many new changes to ALLO. As per usual, the new year saw the site with a new look. With the departure of the images section, a light blue bar was added to bring some colour to the site. A number of sections were removed, including the images section upon which the site was founded. The reason for this was largely due to the fact that I no longer took pictures with the frequency that I had previously. The addition of the, "A Picture Less Ordinary" section sought to help continue the tradition.
In 2005, the, "A Picture Less Ordinary" section was removed as well, making way for the webcams to play a more prominent role. The visual aspect of the site remained the same overall, but the code that powered it shifted gears in a major way. All tables were removed in favour of DIV tags, and style sheets took over the visual aspects of the site. XHTML was introduced late in version 3, and version 4 completed the change over.
Another big step forward in version 4 is the introduction of podcasts, as well as del.icio.us links in Friday Funday.
As per usual, there are future plans that seek to improve the site; most notably a switch to MySQL for the blog. I also plan to improve the site's efficiency via the introduction of more PHP code. I also have a plan to reduce the number of 404 errors.
