David Vivero

It’s been a month or two since my last post, but I don’t feel bad about it: it’s a drop in the bucket. I just realized that it’s been about 10 years since my last real personal web publishing endeavor before this blog. I was an incredibly geeky young kid, as seen here in my first domain, which I rediscovered at the Way Back Machine over the weekend. (I was 14 at the time. Before that, I had a few pages at Geocities and Tripod at around 12 years old.)

It was the mid 1990s and I was inspired by the “view source” tool in Internet Explorer when surfing the Internet. I recognized there was a pattern in all these documents, and I was a relatively artistic young kid, playing music and doing charcoal drawings, so I decided to explore it. I hand coded every page I produced in Notepad on my Windows 95 machine, and then uploaded everything painfully through WS_FTP back in those days. I searched desperately for serial numbers for Adobe Photoshop so that I could make cool graphics; and I relied heavily on the Alien Skin Software plug-ins to make drop shadows and raised typefaces. I got so into the process of coding that I worked on an HTML tutorial with a friend and published it on Timez.com, my domain at the time. I created an HTML fans Webring, which was a basically an ad network that linked people together by their interest in HTML/web publishing.

Inspired by David Siegel’s book “Creating Killer Web Sites,” I was obsessed with the design aspect of web development rather than the dynamic programming languages and database technologies that would really make it possible for the Internet to sing and dance for users. (I also had no money and open-source web frameworks weren’t around, so the only free part of a web development process was manual HTML!) I would play with tables and pixels to get just the right spacing, and worked tirelessly to understand how it was possible to make good graphics load faster. And by “good,” I generally meant shiny 3D graphics, as you can tell. Looking back, I should have probably spent more time on the discipline of programming and I should have continued my obsession. It would have been far more lucrative than going to college.

Timez, if you were wondering, was the domain I chose because my (cough) ‘handle’ online was AiRTiMeZ. You can see the spoof of the “Netscape Now!” button that shows my IRC handle and AOL screen name at the bottom of the page, and it links to my email address at Digiweb, the company where I hosted the page. (I created that new button pixel by pixel in Microsoft Paint.) It was a huge expense to host a domain at Digiweb during those days, when we got a whopping 5MB of storage and I paid about $100 a year in domain registration fees. (Well, at 14, I was fortunate enough that my parents paid for it. When I’d bring him into my room, my grandfather was especially impressed with the designs, even though he had no clue what the hell I was pointing at.)

One other funny artifact from the site: my parents had just purchased their house in the Florida Keys, and they begged me to put their place on the Internet so that we could get some vacation rental clients. This page, pathetically, was the best I could do; I was not interested in prostituting my site for their commerce, which in retrospect was a stubbornness that probably kept me from discovering how huge the Internet economy could be to everyone’s daily life and to my career.