Happy Birthday, DrikoLand! I had grand plans of a redesign or something dramatic to celebrate the 10th birthday of my web site, but as usual I procrastinated too long and don't have anything ready for today.

It still doesn't seem real to me that I've been working on this web page for 10 years now. DrikoLand started as a generic home page in 1995 during my final years at the University of Maryland, with some link pages and lots of crappy animated .GIFs. ;-) Back then, the WWW and FTP were amazing new frontiers, and Netscape had just released its first browser. The addition of "original" content like my 80s pages, military aviation designation pages, and most recently, some of my photography, made the site a little more personal. In particular, the creation of my 80s page and its graphical homage was and is a labor of love. It has always been the most popular portion of my site, although I don't devote nearly enough time to its maintenance. In June 2002, I joined the blogging community, and I still marvel at the ease with which I can add and edit content.

I searched through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see if I could dig up some earlier incarnations of the site, but I couldn't find anything from any of the former domains where my page was hosted (wam.umd.edu, olg.com, gmpexpress.net, us.hsanet.net). I did, however, dig up an old 1997 version of the site from my archives, which is where the old logo at the top of the post comes from. Doesn't seem like much back then, does it? I still kind of miss the old green page, though... I was able to find some driko.org Wayback Machine entries from before I went to the blog format, like this example from January 2002. From those examples you can also see the first two-column blog format I used back in July 2002.

Since then, I've obviously transitioned to a three-column format, but I think I will be looking at modifying that slightly soon. First of all, I'd like to finally ditch the clunky HTML tables and go to a cleaner CSS format that is easier to modify and maintain. I have a couple of ideas in mind, and I'll hopefully find the time soon to make that happen. I would especially like to update the photography portion of the site, as its design is downright ugly right now.

I want to take the time to thank Shaft and Czar, the occasional guest bloggers that have helped to take up the slack on the blog when I wasn't around. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we'd like to see more of your posts. And speaking of guest bloggers, there are a couple of you waiting in the wings that need to finally make the leap and post! You know who you are...

Finally, thanks to everyone who has visited DrikoLand over the years, especially those that have taken the time to leave comments and/or drop me an e-mail. It's those comments and e-mails that have helped to motivate me to maintain and update the site, a sometimes tedious exercise that has nevertheless been a lot of fun overall. Thanks again, and keep visiting! :-)