I created this site in 1996, shortly after I had moved from Sydney to Cambridge. The site was hosted at Cambridge University Engineering Department. The purpose was to post race reports and photographs related to my new passion, rowing, for friends and family. Over the next few years, I added my curriculum vitae, research publications, and travel photographs (snapshot). During this period, I was also webmaster for Churchill College Boat Club (snapshot).
If you had a site back then, you will remember that the online world was different. Photographs were scanned from prints. Bandwidth was at a premium so image file size had to balanced with load time. Hand-crafted HTML would ensure that readers could start reading before the page had finished loading. The concept of site users submitting content was the domain of software engineers. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing captures the spirit of the time.
By 2001, the number of images on the site had grown significantly, so creating hand-crafted HTML to present each image was no longer feasible. I created a MATLAB preprocessor to generate the site from template files and create different sized versions of large images. As the cost of disk space and bandwidth has decreased and the availability of free web services has flourished, the need for this preprocessor has gone away.
The site has moved a few times.
Notes on my Web site by Gerald Oskoboiny addresses questions including