Every now and then I do a few searches across the web to see what comes up when people search my name and/or my username (I believe I have been using “rajamatage” for almost 13 years at this point). One thing that I love about the Internet, and something that I am sure others absolutely loathe, is the fact that it can remember anything and everything. You have services like the Wayback Machine, whose purpose is to simply remember websites the way they were and keep a sort of permanence on the web, and then there are other sites out there that have simply been around since the beginning of (Internet) time.

You may ask: what is Subject 54? Why that name? I honestly couldn’t tell you; I think I thought it just sounded cool at the time.

I recently came across my rajamatage.tripod.com and Subject 54 websites that I made at least a decade ago using free services like Tripod and Angelfire. I can’t even believe that, not only are my sites still up and running, but both Tripod and Angelfire are around as well! You may ask: what is Subject 54? Why that name? I honestly couldn’t tell you; I think I thought it just sounded cool at the time (check out the title of the webpage: “SUBJECT 54: You don’t know what it is and neither do we…”).

That was back when sites like Webmonkey were independently owned and dedicated to the craft of building simple websites. I don’t even think people were talking about CSS standards or W3C compliant websites at that time, but I definitely remember using stylesheets to tweak placement and colors on the screen. Seeing those sites definitely brings back some awesome memories of scripting my first sites and thinking about different websites that I could build (even back then I was thinking about a site called CampgroundReference or something along those lines that would display information on campground sites, ratings about those sites, and activities you could while at those sites…I was a boy scout at the time, after all). Crazy to think that that was only 10 years ago, but  also makes you realize that 10 years is a very long time.