belleliu.com

Ten years ago, on the 20th of July, 1999, I acquired this domain - belleliu.com. So today marks the 10th anniversary of my little online space! I still remember how excited I was to have my first "personal domain" and how much it cost - US$70 at Network Solutions, the monopoly of domain registrar of that time. Back then, not many people got a personal website, even if they got one, it'd be hosted on third-party services like GeoCities or HK CyberCity / Freenation. Mine was hosted with my ISP - Vision Online. My first website was built in 1997 and the URL was: http://users.vol.net/~belleliu, the ISP even had its own "directory" page listing all personal websites of its users! In 1999, the term "blog" was still not yet a known one but it was exactly what my personal website was like: I treated it like an online diary, posting one piece of little story on a frequent basis, documenting my daily life and archiving by month/year, all done in plain old-school table-based HTML. This is a capture of the WHOIS record showing the start date of this domain:

I wasn't able to find any screen shot of my website circa-1999 (who would keep files for 10 years?), so here's a screen shot of the archived version in 2001: Here you can view all old versions archived between 2001 and 2008. Recently I am just too lazy to blog. I got a few new gadgets (MacBook Pro 13", New iPhone 3GS and Nike+ ...) and Facebook has gradually replaced as my main communication tool with friends and family, you know sometimes I just don't have THAT much to write about. As a "blogger" of 10 years, I feel quite strongly about the impact of social networks like Facebook (previously Friendster). I should write more about that later. Now it's time to celebrate: by renewing the domain for another 10 years.