A LIFE ON THE WEB

| website history: 1996-2024 |

01 | Introduction: "deus62" & the WebIn the later second half of the 1990s, before computers were even a thought at schools in Germany, I founded a "Web Team" at the high school I worked at.Sometime during its lengthy history, I ended up with the moniker "deus" (Latin for "god" or "deity"), probably because I told everyone not to play games all the time ... although I myself liked to shoot things up in "DeusEx".The 62 was added because, well, you can guess yourself, and deus62.com was born years later, on the day I had to decide on a catchy, short and memorable domain name.The character on all of the first "DeusEX" posters, covers and screenshots then also became my avatar in most places.

I have had websites of some sort or other online ever since the Web was invented and I had access to it. For me, (web) design and blogging fulfilled the same function as first-person shooters did for other people. It might be an odd comparison, but instead of throwing virtual mines at groups of slimy aliens and enjoying the mayhem, I got a kick out of designing posters, CD covers, flyers and web pages for myself (and sometimes for others), especially to relieve the stress I regularly encountered in my day job.It was a hobby and has remained one until today.I have also always enjoyed writing, for myself and for others, and that's why I have had many different sites, redesigns and projects online until today. I never really cared if anyone read what I had to say, but at some point I noticed that lots of people did and, in the heyday of blogging, not a day went by with lots of comments that needed to be moderated.Two of those websites became mainstays of my online life for decades, deus62.com and, for a longer while, livingwithmusic.com, although I also had a Tumblr blog online at some point and regularly participated on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit for quite some time.

02 | My First 'Real' Website

I went online around 1995 (Internet Explorer 1.0, Netscape Navigator 2.0, HTML 2.0), and started dabbling here and there, learning HTML (later Cascading Style Sheets, from the moment they started to appear) and trying my hand at code snippets I found around the Web.But, my first real website didn't happen until around 2002, when Rick Ellis released the first version of pMachine (this was before WordPress became a thing in 2003, when Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg first created a fork of b2/cafelog and then needed quite some time to expand upon and improve the code base).The websites before that had all been constructed using David Siegel's "Creating Killer Websites" tricks (essentially slicing up an elaborate design and sticking it into a convoluted table layout). The first edition of that book (blue) was my bible and when the second edition (black) rolled around, the air had already begun to change and there were signs that things were beginning to shift towards other techniques.

Already in 1997, in his fascinating article "The Web Is Ruined and I ruined it", David Siegel pretty much regretted having spread these tricks because they prevented the "proper separation of structure (HTML), style (CSS), and semantics (XML) [which] make content more compelling and design more effective."It wasn't until I started following Molly Holzschlag and people like Jeffrey Zeldman that I also became interested in "web standards" and actually started to consciously think about how I could improve my websites and which software could help me achieve a proper separation of structure and content.

Already these first attempts at a website quickly started to revolve around my hobbies, book and music collecting, as well as linking to various interesting things I encountered while surfing the - then - slim and quickly developing world wide web, but they did not have my own domain address attached to it. I simply cannot remember where and how I published these first iterations of what was to become deus62.com, but somehow I managed to do so, probably through a server my workplace had available.What I do remember though is spending lots of time at Lance Arthur's "Glassdog Club", at the time a creative (web design) forum where new ideas and approaches could be discussed and lots of knowledgeable people helped to solve any problems you were likely to run into. Glassdog.club went belly up around the year 2000 and, unfortunately, I have no idea what happened to Lance Arthur, who completely disappeared from view, but he and his forum were a great help way back when.

So, employing David Siegel's tricks, I designed a more structured layout in 2002 when I finally came up with and bought the deus62.com domain, which was hosted by DomainFactory (they used to be excellent and have rapidly declined since they were bought by HostEurope, which was then gobbled up by GoDaddy).

03 | Same Tricks, New Software

Still using the same tricks, I changed the design and layout of my site when EllisLab came up with their new and much improved publishing software, "Expression Engine". Because pMachine was about to disappear into digital nirvana, I switched over.

I fondly remember the time with Expression Engine, simply because their customers' forum was such a great place to be. It was infused with a kind a pioneering spirit as well as lots of people who helped beginners out, wrote at length about tips & tricks and, in general, were a group of fantastic people. On top of that, I met lots of people who ran their own blogs using Rick Ellis' software. Many bloggers of that time became "online friends" as we all frequently visited each other's sites and started fascinating discussions around all sorts of topics.

04 | livingwithmusic.com

When my former hosting provider gave away really cheap lifetime hosting subscriptions for a day or two (some anniversary PR thing), I jumped on the offer and, because I had noticed that I was writing more about music on deus62.com than anything else, I started a second website to cater to people like me, music collectors with substantial collections.Livingwithmusic.com was born.Surprisingly enough, that site took off quickly, gained a substantial audience and even more exposure when it was featured (6th place) in the "Expression Engine Website Shootout". After the shootout, an interview with me was published on the ExpressionEngine website, driving even more people to my new website.

05 | 9rules

Because it had been quite successful, in 2005 I applied for a membership with "9rules", a somewhat "elite" blog network and quite the rage at the time (some of the most renowned bloggers and designers were members there for a while).I was accepted and with my integration into the music community of the 9rules network, my readership again grew considerably.

In retrospect, those years on 9rules validated everything I had done until that point in time and gave it a massive boost.I had been active on music forums, on web design forums and on various known websites for ages, and it finally all started to come together. People were linking to my posts, the comments started rolling in and for a few years, my website became a mainstay for many collectors, also individuals who didn't have other outlets to voice their opinion or were not savvy enough to run their own websites. I fondly remember a few incredibly knowledgeable commenters, from the Netherlands, from the UK, from the US and South America, whose comments over the years started to approach book-length studies of their various areas of interest.

On 9rules itself, I started following great bloggers who went on to great or even greater things. Matt Brett, Paul Stamatiou, Jonathan Snook, Brian Veloso and Jared Christensen are just a few names that come to mind. It was an innovative and vibrant scene, one with people branching out into various areas of work, developing websites for known companies and personalities, programming renowned apps, joining the companies of the day, and altogether living the Web 2.0 dream. 9rules also ran a great members' forum which I often participated in, getting to know the people, following their career paths and discussing just about every topic under the sun with everyone.At some point, I was also entrusted with running the music community on the network, which brought further engagement by being able to post community news and articles on the 9rules site directly.

The 9rules homepage in 2006, with my blog, livingwithmusic.com, featured in the top left and a post appearing at the top of the blog feed just below.

But, 9rules itself started to get caught up in the massive pressure to adapt, innovate and expand.At around the same time, while I was a member of 9rules, someone had helped me join the totally new "Facebook" through some US university and, I think, I might have been one of the very first Germans to actually be a member there (before anyone in Europe actually knew what it was).At that time, I didn't really post much and mainly connected with my various 9rules acquaintances, but I quickly began to notice how people perceived the interaction there to be "easier", "quicker" and more "immediate". Already then you could see that the development of social networks would have a major impact on what we had all been doing up until that time.And then 9rules started to implode.

06 | 9rules Exodus & WordPress

After a while, it became clear that the people behind 9rules were beginning to lose their footing.9rules was expanding too quickly for those members who had been there from the start, the network went through 3 versions in quick succession, "Ali", "Ali 2" and "Chawlk", 9rules was redesigned constantly, social bookmarking became a thing and external sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us and Twitter were integrated into each user's profile.Although these realignments were the result of a quickly evolving World Wide Web, in the process, 9rules lost its focus and shifted away from the initial idea of mainly aggregating high-quality blogs from around the web.People were beginning to complain that these realignments resulted in traffic to their sites slowing to a trickle and disliked that 9rules was starting to put demands on their participation in the network. In the beginning, 9rules had basically just integrated each member's blog posts to give it exposure, but then the executive floor demanded more.So, people started leaving in droves. I left in 2008, the network was later sold and has since, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.

This move coincided with my switch to WordPress.Expression Engine had become a little too complicated for me and some health problems were beginning to limit the time I could devote to my websites. WordPress was simply more efficient for my purposes and allowed me to keep hanging on.The first WordPress version of livingwithmusic.com was a minimal and elegant theme-based redesign, one which existed for the time I needed to learn how WordPress worked.

07 | Tumblr

While I was learning WordPress and getting things realigned, I also kept a Tumblr blog around that I had started to keep in touch with friends.I just called it "grumpyoldgeezer" and started posting, alerting friends and acquaintances to it. Besides this single screenshot, nothing has survived, but I remember that it had accumulated several hundred short posts in a first attempt at what people had started to call "microblogging" .

08 | Switching to WordPress

After the switch to WordPress, livingwithmusic.com underwent constant changes while I was diving ever more deeply into the WordPress ecosystem.At the same time though, I was also experiencing fatigue. For a while, I didn't really feel like devoting much free time to the project by actually blogging consistently.I also didn't need to because the site had reached a level of traffic that regularly brought thousands of visitors to certain key posts and pages. So, in effect, it was running itself, no matter what happened in the background. I had some very successful posts and pages up that had, without any conscious effort and at least until the algorithms began to change, garnered first-place positions on Google:

09 | Interlude: "Blogging Is Dead!"

I cannot pin-point it exactly, but at some point after my switch to WordPress, I started noticing a substantial decline in interaction with readers and visitors. The regulars hung around and commented frequently, but new visitors remained essentially silent.As more and more social networks began to take hold, people became reluctant to comment, discuss/debate or add anything worthwhile to other sites outside of those environments and with that development, a lot of the fun was taken out of livingwithmusic.com, which, up until that point, had accumulated anywhere between 8000 to 10000 - often more detailed and sometimes very elaborate - comments on a several hundred posts, and had generated lots of (pleasant) e-mail correspondence.On top of that, I began to notice that other (major) blogs I had been following had begun to to turn off comments altogether, either because they were tired of the spam tsunami that was hitting each and every WordPress site, or, more likely, because comments were too few and far between to actually merit the time spent on separating the wheat from the chaff.

10 | The Death of "livingwithmusic.com"

In light of the above developments, I decided to terminate livingwithmusic.com and integrate about 50 percent of the longer, in-depth and most popular posts into a revived deus62.com.The domain, livingwithmusic.com, was then immediately snatched up by one of those despicable grifters, perhaps living off the traffic rank the domain had reached. Besides putting up a single page on day one, nothing whatsoever has happened on that page until today (last checked: October 2024).What a waste.

11 | Reviving "deus62.com"

On the revived deus62.com domain, I kept blogging and redesigning, enjoying the work with various excellent themes the always reliable elmastudio.de and Mike McAllister came up with.But, real life often got in the way and health problems started to multiply for a couple of years. So, like most other people, for some years I spent more time on social networks (especially first Facebook and then Instagram) and conversing with friends and acquaintances there. The blogging gradually moved into the background and became more infrequent, but never stopped.

11 | "Death Throes of a WordPress Site"

Intermittently, my site would fall silent until I picked it up again, simply because I felt like playing around with it and occupying my mind with other things. At some point, I started posting longer "summary" posts, like "This Month in Music" or "Weekly Digest" , but my posting schedule had shrivelled down to one post every couple of weeks.At some point, updating the complex publishing backend, the various themes, plugins and whatnot became more than cumbersome and I began to hate WordPress for being too sluggish, a spam magnet and riddled with (especially plugin) security updates that rolled in all too often.In regard to blogging, I didn't think there was really a point to it anymore. Social networking sites had become totally prominent and online culture had changed fundamentally.So, in 2017, I first put all my various sites and activities into permanent limbo and then I deleted all of them, across websites and social network profiles.Below then is a screenshot of the final reincarnation of my old sites, all rolled into one: the final deus62.com run on a self-hosted WordPress backend.

12 | 'Carrd.co' to the Rescue

Besides being a playground of sorts to get away from the workload of my day job, one of the main purposes of my old sites had also always been to stay in touch with friends from around the globe. Because I had led an international life for many years, I needed a place where people could always find me, especially because at some point I decided that Facebook wasn't a place I wanted to be active on anymore and, successively, I had also put pretty much all my other social network activities elsewhere on hold.When I became increasingly interested in things such as downsizing, (more) minimalist living and new developments like micro-blogging, I decided to find a cheaper, less time-consuming and complex solution that would allow me to tinker with my sites as a hobby and keep them updated on a more regular basis as a one-stop for anyone who would like to know more about me or get in touch.It would also be a website that I could link to whenever I needed to give people a link to surf to if they wanted to know more about me.

One evening, in 2019, approximately two years after I had deleted each and every previous website and because an old 9rules acquaintance had alerted me to it being up on ProductHunt (and quite the rage), I found the perfect solution for my use case with carrd.co, signed up, tweaked things a bit in one single late-night session, and published a new website in a shorter amount of time than it took me to write a post on my old WordPress site(s).

Carrd.co on the ProductHunt website, many years ago.

Carrd was actually developed to help people publish one-page websites quickly and efficiently, using any of the countless well-designed templates as a starting point, but I looked at this new website generator differently and created a new deus62.com using subdomains.The heart of my website would be a "micro blog", one page per year, and everything else, old micro blogs, longer articles like this one, archives and legal matter would reside on one subdomain each, easily interlinked with each other.Yes, that is not exactly SEO-friendly, far from it, but I simply didn't care because increasing traffic wasn't the point. As I mentioned above, I needed an easy to keep one-stop for people I knew and a website to link to when needed. Carrd gave me the tool to achieve that goal within a few hours.

13 | On With the Show ...

With this current version of deus62.com, I don't need to bother with databases, updates, themes, spam moderation and whatnot. I can always just design a little here and there, piece a few things together in a couple of minutes and be done with it. Updating the core of this website, my micro-blog, takes a couple of minutes per day and, if I feel like it, I can add a page like this one in an hour or less if the text is ready to go.Because I'm not interested in any "clout", rising visitor numbers or anything of the kind, it also doesn't bother me that in regard to ranking in search engines, you probably won't find this site if you don't know the "deus62" moniker. That's a conscious decision because if you google my real name, there are far too many totally irrelevant and age-old links to posts on forums, website profiles and other things that I would rather see disappear. On top of that, Google itself has become a total shitshow and I haven't bothered for one single second trying to make sure anyone finds this site.So, since I published my first website ages ago, things have changed drastically and fundamentally. I think the history of this domain, deus62.com, shows that quite well. I think this might be, at least partially, a typical story of an average blogger that just wanted to be a little more active on the Web.Towards the end of my WordPress-powered websites, I had often lost interest in my websites for a while, was too busy to update them, found many things too cumbersome or just lived the real life instead of a virtual one, something that as you grow older seems to be taking more prominence for just about everyone.I had also become disillusioned with the Internet as a whole. People had started to try to monetize just about everything, interaction had taken last place on most blogs and sites I used to frequent and, on top of all of that, people had started to shut down their websites and moved elsewhere, usually to places behind a paywall to ensure that an income stream could be generated.

But, this reborn version of "deus62.com" has gotten much more consistent attention than any of my previous iterations. As I look back at what I have written and published here, I actually managed to keep it consistent since August 1, 2019. As of today, that's 1914 days that I can add to my publishing schedule, which extends across nearly three decades.Best of all, what I had envisioned for this site worked out splendidly. Many people use it as a contact hub and I've managed to stay in touch with people from around the globe. I've had former students of mine look me up, I've had former 9rules members get in touch, I've had former classmates of mine from my time at the "Copenhagen International School" reach out, and I've enjoyed tons of contacts that inquired about my former "Jazz in Paris", "Mosaic Discographies" and even my "Oscar Peterson" appreciation pages that were canned when I killed livingwithmusic.com.The net is not dead, it has just changed. There are still plenty of people interested in connecting outside of those destructive mosh pits that call themselves Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatnot.So, I'll probably be around here until I drop dead, and if I remember or have the time to plan it properly, this website might very well outlive me for a couple of years.

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