Today, StormShock.com turns 22 years old.
It was the first domain name I ever purchased, and I bought it from GoDaddy. I was 20 years old and a computer science student in college.
Here is the first Wayback Machine snapshot of StormShock, from March 2, 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010302221852/http://www.stormshock.com/
Back then, I populated a history database and wrote code to generate custom timelines. I thought I had the biggest historical timeline on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist at the time. I think now Wikipedia has much more historical information than my website ever had.
A couple years later I also added a Chinese-English translator, art galleries, a fantasy name generator, friends’ websites, my own blog, my own RPG game, web tutorials, and CMS software written from scratch (these were the pre-WordPress days). I also attempted to sell web hosting for $1.70 per month, and my brother attempted to sell his music. By 2002, StormShock consisted of almost a thousand web pages.
Today, I’ve removed much of it from the site. The main reason is that big companies like Google and WordPress came along and made much of what I was doing obsolete. They are big companies, and I was just one college kid posting random “free time” projects online.
StormShock.com today is the official website for my professional projects and business dealings, doing business as StormShock Media LLC. I’m proud to say that StormShock.com has been around longer than many people on the internet today have been alive.
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