Thursday, June 4, 2015

Redesign & Reflection on History of the Lab



 If you have visited this site before a couple of days ago, you may notice that things have been changed around a bit. Then again, you probably have not because I've neglected until today to have Google crawl the new site or even update Google Analytics to reflect the new URL, http://retrolab.servebeer.com which should stay the same for quite some time unless I ever actually buy a domain or no-ip.org sells out. I've changed a lot to make things more flexible and more mobile-friendly. Some new sections to "Projects" will be added soon for my other projects, and there will also soon be a new page for the DPRK game. 

 Lab of Jizaboz was originally created in 1999 on a hosting site that offered free webspace called "50 megs". At the time I was working as a web producer for a local newspaper. My job at the time basically was importing tiffs off macs via a zip drive, importing them as jpegs and resizing them, and slapping HTML tags all around raw text dumps originally generated on ATEX machines. After it all looked good locally, I FTP'd it to the webserver and went home around 2:00 am. The website was a way of me having some sort of Internet presence as well as practice and learn new things for my job.


An ATEX terminal

 The site originally featured a tombstone in a dreary graveyard, with the words "THE UNDERGROUND LAB OF JIZABOZ" plastered across it. Of course there was MIDI music, a track called "devil" I found off some Halloween-related site with midi files and gifs flashing all over.  I had a main navigation menu table I had basically ripped off of slashdot.org at the time across the top with the URLS to my different sections, with slashes between them. The original content mainly consisted of random things I typed up about computers and video games, links to other sites, downloads for emulators and roms, and pictures of large, topless girls. The latter ended up getting me in a bit of trouble once I finally got a cable ISP and moved my site to their "free" website space.

 Eventually, once was actually producing things like my Doom 2 mod, maps for games, etc, all real "content" there became what I had made either by myself or with the help of a team. While the site has changed structure, domain names and types of content numerous times, the basic premise remains the same; this is my presence on the Internet, not Facebook.