Hardcore Comp USA.
A rambling essay about losing my website.
My website is gone….
The one I had for 26 years…
The one that I updated and copy pasted every time I had a new book out…
The one I kept all my show diaries on….
The one that told the world about my music and all the cool things I had been doing all this time…
It’s just gone.
It’s gone because Tripod.com, a free web service that I had been using forever, no longer exists….
I lost everything last year and I didn’t even know it…
Pages that I had copied and updated to make new pages were gone…I didn’t save anything…I wrote the entire history of Lampstand, my band in high school, plus our reunion 8 years later….and it just disappeared…
All my shows as Davey G and the Keyboard…just gone…I had a whole diary of all my shows before I went over to blogger….all that stuff, wiped out….
26 years of my words….
What to do, what to do…
I guess I could write about it…
I am using open source NeoCities to build a rudimentary HTML site..
And I recall way back in 2000…when I took a class called Hypermedia 101 with Sean Cohen…
I wasn’t sure what I was doing there, or why I picked it…I knew nothing about computers…I had only recently ever been on the internet…he used the first class to scare the shit out of everyone…making it seem like his class would be like war…and if we were not down for it…well, we could just go home now…
Well…I wanted to learn…I didn’t want to be scared off…but I had this crudely Commander Worf reason for staying….as the person I was with at the time provided me with the motivation simply be being there….I didn’t want to be a quitter, or look bad in her eyes….
She’s long gone now and it’s no hard feelings. But I stayed and somehow during that four-month semester I clawed my way to a passing grade while building my first site….for my zine… Davezine….
My first email was davecookson@excite.com. Excite had other services, I dallied with the dating service without actually using it to find anyone. My Website was on Tripod.com out of Williamstown Mass. I built my pages using the tags I was taught in the class…I learned about view source and how I could copy code and figure out how it worked…but mainly I just built a functional but crude web page with pictures and twirling money gifs not connecting to any actual payment services.
It was fun and at the time it was cutting edge. I never tried to get better at it…
And when I started using it later…my dormant site became reactivated….
To be continued….or not.