The very first main page of this site was first uploaded on January 28, 1997. It was a typical "starting webmaster's" page from that time, meaning a huge incoherent vertically oriented pile-up of graphics and text (funny enough, that's also what many blogs and MySpace pages look like today). The "Microwave Canary" was already present on it, which makes it one of the oldest parts of this site. Below is a collection of parts that were part of the huge mess that was once the home page.
   The old title logo, and some of the uncountable irritating animated GIFs, like the ubiquitous rotating "nuclear" symbol. Your site needed to be littered with animated junk those days to be cool. |
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 Coop Doughnuts. A reference to Twin Peaks, which gives you an idea how old the first main page was. |
 Sergeant Kotzpuw. If you don't know what that means, ask someone who speaks Dutch. The image was taken from the ‘Kid Paddle’ comics by Midam. |
 This is the famous Easter Chicken, created during boring Latin lessons back in 1993 and re-mastered to this Special Edition in 1997. |
 The poor guy in this image was a maths teacher at the time the first home page was made. The few people who remember him, might also remember this. |
On April 9, 1997, I uploaded the first major revision of the site, which attempted to be a little more structured. The messy ‘catch-all’ homepage was replaced by a cool looking ‘interface’ which linked to separate pages. It took a whole day to draw the home page and another day to make it work. This second version stayed here until October 2, 1998. This is what it looked like:
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The third iteration replaced the previous one on October 2, 1998. The site itself was again cleaned up, and the main page was completely redesigned. The idea was to make it more modular so parts could be added or changed, but in practice this has hardly happened because it was still cumbersome to modify the image and clickable maps. This image took even longer to make, it's a combination of some rendered 3D graphics and hand-made drawings in Photoshop. Unlike the previous version, this one has lasted for a whopping 10 years. The display at the top right was animated and reacted to mouse movements like the current one, but I disabled it here to keep things simple.
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The ‘calibration’ button took you to a page containing the above image (still available in the random archive). It allowed to set the brightness and contrast on your CRT monitor to decent values, which was not self-evident back then. For some more nostalgia, the info page stated that the minimum requirements to view the site properly, were a PC with at least 110MHz and a 16-bit color monitor with 800x600 pixels.
This image, which is actually a tiny ray-traced 3D animation, was at the bottom of each page, and linked back to the main page. It took a while before I realised that moving stuff below text could become pretty annoying.
An interesting fact: the first main page took 360KiBytes in total, due to all the piled-up junk. Of course, with the dial-up speeds which were common at that time, this made it take awfully long to load. The second home page took 180KiB and the third one only 130KiB.
Until January 16, 2001, the site had always been located on a server of my university (www.student.kuleuven.ac.be), but then I moved the site to a "Belgacom.net" account because it offered more space and the possibility existed that I would leave the university (which did not happen as I started another master and a PhD). Unfortunately Belgacom closed all access to their FTP server in September 2001, except for their dial-in users. Because it wasn't quite practical to boot up my modem and spice up the telephone bill each time I wanted to update the site, I moved it again, this time to a F2S (Freedom2Surf) account. This was a remnant of the first dot com bubble, one of the last real free webspace providers, and the quality of the hosting was excellent. Alas, at the end of 2001 they also announced that they would end their free hosting services.
I then moved to 'F2G' for a short time, which is run by Portland. This was also for free, but the servers were full so often and the speed was so disastrous that I finally decided to move to paid hosting. I found a very good deal at 34SP.com. Of course it's not for free but the value for money is very good.
In March, 2008, 34SP changed their free domain names from "*.34sp.com" to something I didn't really like, so I finally went for my own domain name and registered the "dr-lex.be" domain.
Here is a list of URLs where this site has existed in the past, in case you want to dig up the old versions in the Internet Archive:
The Hageland Hardcore Site: Although Hardcore and Punkrock may only be a small side-corner of my musical taste, this site was dedicated to some bands playing these styles, from the "Hageland" area in Belgium. It was started in May 1997 and initially served as the website from 'PN' (formerly Portie Nootjes). Especially the guestbook became a favourite meeting-place for a lot of young people, actually it became more like a message board than a guestbook. With the advent of the 'Funtime' site and its forum, the popularity of the HH site started to decline. It was decommisioned in February 2007.
Archive URLs: http://urc1.cc.kuleuven.ac.be/~m9621324/, http://www.hageland.34sp.com/
De Bar: This was the website of the youth center of the "Diependaal" residential quarter in Herent, Belgium. As I didn't have the time to maintain it, it was replaced by a new site with a rather ugly WinXP-look. The original site remained online for several years until f2g finally moved it to the trash.
Archive URL: http://debar.f2g.net
Oud-leerlingenvereniging Sint-Albertuscollege Haasrode: The site of the past pupil union of my former high school. (This site is in Dutch only.) It's in a kind of non-active state now because so is the past pupil union, and will probably disappear or be reduced to a few pages in the near future.
The Official Intoxicated Site: Although the (very) local band "Intoxicated" (not to be confused with the American band with the same name) has been dead a long time, their "official" site still exists, as a kind of relic. Nothing has changed about it since it was abandoned on January 9th, 1998, so don't expect something really exciting...
DJ Dickhead's Free MP3 page: This site has been obliterated somewhere in 2000 because of too few visitors, and because Tripod.com liked to delete accounts at random. This site was nothing more than a kind of decoy to see how many people got on the page, and how (it was tracked by a few extended stat counters). The page did contain free mp3 files and looked professional at first sight, but as you may guess by the name of the fictious “DJ”, the music was horrendous, actually it was an attempt to create the most repulsive sounding noise which could still be classified under the name “music”. Surprisingly, the site had thousands of hits during its first months, but after a year the number of visitors suddenly dropped to almost zero, most likely because either the word about the repulsive noise had spread around the world, or because search engines started to filter out anything looking like a site offering illegal MP3's — yet the page was 100% legal!
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