Last week Lowmanio.co.uk celebrated it's 9th birthday. It's hard to believe I've had this website for over 9 years, and have been hosting it myself for the last three years. It's changed quite a lot - to start with it was a Due South fan site, then a Savage Garden fan site, then a site where I posted lots of random links, and finally to this current blog.

I started on good old Geocities, and I'm sure my first few designs were full of early HTML horrors such as marquees, mouse pointer trails and animated GIFs. I soon filled up my 50MB quota that Geocities gave on photos from Due South, but then discovered a way around this and exploited Geocities' space for all it's worth. My discovery: Geocities was not global. Geocities allowed a regional domain, for example http://yahoo.geocities.co.uk/<name> based on what your country of origin was. I discovered that if you changed the .co.uk to a different country, such as India or Brazil's country codes - you got a whole new 50MB of Geocities space without having to create a new account! The only downside was the admin section was in a different language, but if you knew where the options you wanted were then there was no problem. I think I used a total of 7 worldwide Geocities domains for my one username, racking up a huge website with all my online content. Geocities went downhill a few years after I joined up by making their advertisements much more annoying and prominent, so I switched to another free online hosting company and downsized my website.

Sadly I don't have any of my old horrific designs or content, but I thought in celebration of the website's birthday I'd give the current version a bit of a Geocities retro theme. I hope it doesn't hurt your eyes too much!