About ShepWeb

ShepWeb was started back in the old days when the hottest web browser around was NCSA Mosaic (soon to be outclassed by this upstart Mozilla browser). That would put its conception around 1993. I wasn't very good about creation or modification dates, but I can look back at some of my files and images which have '93 dates on them.

Originally it was just a Mosaic hotlist. At that time there were some bugs in Mosaic that made your browser really slow if the hotlists got too big. So I offloaded my hotlists into webspace and started calling the collection ShepWeb. There weren't no GUI HTML editors back then, my son. No, we had to do things the hard way and put our tags in by hand. The images used to load REEEAALY slow so you'd do this GIF interlacing so you could actually see the images as they partially downloaded. I think the web was fast back then, it was just the CPU speed of our 33HMz Macintosh Quadras (the PowerPC hadn't been invented yet) that was the bottleneck.

I tried for ages to get it listed on Yahoo but for some reason they never put me in. I think I understand now that I only had lists of links as opposed to any real content—though my links had comments on them and were categorized (hmm... not much different than Yahoo—perhaps they saw me as competition? ;-). I think I've got more content now, but lists were important back then as you could actually count the websites as they were added, and the NCSA What's New site was THE place to announce your new web site.

Around `95 I started some projects at work (the defunct "OLMS") that took a lot of time out of my web tinkering. It wasn't until `97 that I got back into web design with my first commercial project (Homestead Bed and Breakfast) using Frontier 5 as my development platform. (I was sad to leave HTML.edit behind. It was a fabulous implementation of Apple's HyperCard, but even the author Murray Altheim stopped development on it.)