I’ve had a Web site since about 1995, when the Web was young. The Internet crackled with excitement and openness and promise. Nobody could imagine that it would turn into an advertising and surveillance engine, as it has.
I coded my original site by hand in Notepad, created a simple logo in Microsoft Paint, and uploaded it all via FTP to the free space my ISP gave me. My original address was http://members.iquest.net/~jimgrey. I submitted the URL to Yahoo! in hopes they would include it in their original human-indexed search engine, and to my delight, they did!
At first it was a site about me and my family, like we all used to do then. But shortly my wife objected to me sharing family info online, so I turned the site into an info resource about central-Indiana radio stations. I’ve always had a deep interest in radio and it was fun to catalog local stations while teaching myself advanced (for the time) Web development techniques.
In about 2000 I got Microsoft FrontPage and Corel PaintShop Pro and redesigned the site to the design it still wears. I switched my ISP to Comcast and therefore my site’s address to http://home.comcast.net/~jimgrey. In 2006 I got proper hosting, registered the jimgrey.net domain, and moved my site there. I wanted jimgrey.com but someone was, and still is, parking on it and I didn’t and don’t want to pay them to get it.
I’d started my road-trip hobby and began to write long-form reports of those trips on my site. They’re still available; see them all here. When I started this blog, my original vision was that my main site would stay about road trips and the blog would be about everything else that interests me. By 2010 the blog got way more traffic than the main site, so I started writing road-trip posts here too. They’re all under the Road Trips category; see them all here.
In 2012 I stopped adding content to jimgrey.net to focus on the blog. In 2014 I made a few code changes to make it more compatible with mobile phone browsers. Since then, I’ve ignored jimgrey.net.
Three things prevent me from killing it. First, I’ve had it in one form or another for 25 years, which makes me a genuine Web old-timer. I like having the evidence to prove it. Second, since 2011 my blog address (blog.jimgrey.net) has been a subdomain of jimgrey.net; for that to keep working, I need to keep owning the jimgrey.net domain. It seems silly to keep it and not put anything on it. Third, those road-trip reports are now historic records, as much has changed along those roads over the years. I don’t mean to be grandiose; the Library of Congress hasn’t come inquiring or anything.
Here’s just one example. Here’s the Michigan Road, the Dixie Highway, and US 31 southbound, 6 miles north of Plymouth, Indiana, as it looked in September, 2007. US 31 curves off to the left under that overpass, and the Michigan Road follows that one-lane ramp toward Plymouth. That overpass is northbound Michigan Road, which merges with northbound US 31 to the left just outside of the photo.
Since I made that photo, US 31 was rebuilt on new terrain from South Bend to a point a few miles southeast of here. From Google Street View, this is what the road looks like from about this same spot today.
Former US 31 was removed from here to where it meets up with the new-terrain US 31. The overpass that carried the Michigan Road was removed and the road rebuilt in the same place at grade. The four-lane former US 31 still exists from South Bend to here as a county road.
Off the top of my head I can think of six other major changes to roads, or to things along the roadside, from what I documented long ago! I’ll bet if I repeated all of my old road trips I’d find scores more major changes.
It’s a head scratcher, what to do with all this interesting content I created so long ago. It deserves to live on as a sort of historic record, for the small audience who finds it interesting or useful. It’s heavily deranked on Google now, I assume because of its age and because it’s on straight HTML pages. I’d like to make it easier for that audience to find it.
I could recreate it all here on the blog. It would be a massive project, and I’d be sharing now information I gathered as long as 14 years ago. I suppose I could title posts to reveal the year I made the trip. It would enhance the ability for interested people to find this information when they search for it. But I’m not sure it would interest most of my regular blog audience.
Another option I’ve considered is blowing away my old HTML jimgrey.net site, setting up a self-hosted WordPress instance there, and moving all of my old road-trip pages to it. It would still be a massive project, and it would still make that info more searchable, but it would remain a separate site to maintain.
I’m not sure what’s best! But I do know that it’s time to stop putting this off.
