While the whole world was shocked on the 911 terrorist attack on United States in 2001, 11 September 2001 is also the day that I implement my personal website James Ooi Online using PHP. With the help of the official PHP site (www.php.net) and existing programming skills in Perl and C, I managed to write the required scripts for the home page and the photo gallery. However, the guestbook (now removed) which was developed in Perl a year before was left untouched, and only rewritten in PHP after more than 2 years.

A couple of days ago, I have reviewed the changes of logos for JOLmy over the last 10 years. This time, I will review the services that JOLmy is hosted from the time my website first started.

The first host was GeoCities (now known as Yahoo! GeoCities). It was the only free web hosting service I knew then. Then, GeoCities web pages are grouped into cities and suburbs. And James Ooi’s Home Page was located at Horizon suburb of the SiliconValley city at house number 5420, therefore giving the URL http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/5420 (well, clicking this URL will open a page with a page not found message). GeoCities have since use member login name as a directory to the domain for member pages URL.

For half a year, I stayed on with GeoCities, but on 13 May 1998, I visited a home page of my friend who is studying in Australia, she had a home page hosted at XOOM.com (now defunct). XOOM.com gave unlimited space, unlike GeoCities only provided 2MB then. Besides, XOOM.com did not force any ad banner/popups on member pages then, other than a requirement to put a link back to XOOM.com. Hence, the following day, I shifted my entire site to XOOM.com on the URL http://members.xoom.com/jamesooi/ (the xoom.com domain has been bought by another company).

Strange things started to happen some time in January 1999 and again in February 1999. My site started to appear within a blank frame automatically inserted by XOOM.com. I suspected that forced advertising would be implemented. True! At the end of February, they announced the implementation of XOOMbar, a frame for advertising will be implemented on all member pages! I shifted my site to Tripod at the URL http://jolnet.tripod.com/ on 10 March 1999, 3 days before XOOMbar was implemented. The URL was later changed to http://jolmy.tripod.com/ when I decided to use JOLmy instead of JOLnet as the name of my site. Tripod only forced a single popup window, which is still acceptable.

However, by middle of 2001, besides the standard popup window forced on Tripod member pages, Tripod started to force additional bigger popup windows and that is unacceptable. On 30 August 2001, I decided to subscribe to a paid hosting service based in the United States. The following day, JOLmy was moved to the paid hosting at the URL http://www.jolmy.com/ where it remains till today.

The former Guestbook

A guestbook for visitors to leave comments was introduced on 21 November 1997. It was then hosted by Lpage (later known as Guestworld, and now known as Tripod’s HTMLGear Guestbook). On 19 November 2000, I developed my own CGI-based guestbook script and had it hosted on VirtualAve free hosting before I finally shifted it to my paid hosting service on 3 September 2001. The guestbook was later rewritten in PHP where it remained till I decided to remove the guestbook a few months ago.

Do you post your photo online?

Chances are, 8 out of 10 of you will say yes to this question. You can create a personal website and publish anything you want, including your photos like what I do. Or you can publish your photos in a blog. Or there are many social networking websites like Friendster where you can upload your photos into the photo album service provided. In fact, many of us, myself included, have at least one Friendster account. And some of us open new accounts when we almost reach the 1000 friends limit. And most of us with Friendster accounts, post our photos online!

Oh well… this is the year 2007. Doing what is described above is a norm.

However, things were different 10 years ago. Not many of us post our photos online then. There were no digital cameras. There were image scanners, but not many could afford one. Not many of us even scan our photos. There was no Friendster, no blogs, except for free personal home page services provided by GeoCities, Tripod, etc. And well, not many of us even had an Internet connection.

Among the people I know then, I was the first to post my photos online. It all started with experimenting the GeoCities personal home page late night on 11 November 1997, which gave birth to James Ooi’s Home Page, as my site was then known. The result was a simple page, with a brief introduction about myself, and some photographs taken during my Certificate level convocation at TAR College 3 months earlier. The photographs are still available at James Ooi Online > J Gallery > TARC Convocation 1997.

The next thing I did was to inform my collegemates of this site. If you have seen the photographs from the link above, you would have notice that I am not alone in most of them. Many of my friends are in the photos too! And when they knew their face is online, they screamed at me! One of them even “threatened to kill me” (of course he is not going to do that). They could not accept having any photographs with them in it being posted online. It wasn’t a norm. Every now and then, they complained about me posting photographs online, warned me that bad things would happen as in people will use your photo to do weird things, etc, etc, bla bla bla….

And so it went on. I kept on improving and updating my site, posted new photos as and when it became available. I scanned all the photos I took and chose many of them to publish online. Some did not like the idea of posting photo online, some did not mind … and oh! Its’ 2007 now!

Apparently, these friends of mine who complained about me posting photographs taken with them together in my website no longer complained for some years back. Most of them have their Friendster account, together with photographs uploaded to their Friendster photo album. Well, as always, it takes time for people to accept a new idea. While some adopt a new idea early, some takes time to accept it. I may be an early adopter of posting photographs online, however, I do admit, I took longer to adopt another idea - blogging!

November 1997 - March 1999

Then known as James Ooi’s Home Page, it did not have a logo. The title James Ooi’s Home Page appear across the header of every page in the site during this period where I changed hosts from GeoCities to XOOM.com.

March 1999 - September 1999

In March 1999, when I moved the site from XOOM.com to Tripod due to the implementation of the annoying XOOMbar, I signed up for the username jolnet, hence the URL jolnet.tripod.com. Together with this, I introduced the first logo (above), with also an intention to register for the domain name jol.net some day.

September 1999 - July 2001

After realizing that jol.net has been taken, I decided to discard the abbreviation JOLnet and adopt JOLmy where “my” is the top level domain for Malaysia. I introduced the 2nd logo (above) to reflect the change.

July 2001 - June 2002

This is a revised logo of the September 1999 version. In September 2000, I registered the domain name jolmy.com. However, it was only 10 months later I added a “.com” wording to the logo in this revision.

June 2002 - August 2004

A colorful logo was introduced together with a complete redesign of the website.

August 2004 - July 2006

After more than 2 years, another change of logo is made, giving prominence to red, yellow and white.

July 2006 - September 2006

The return of the colorful logo, with some changes with the June 2002 version, of course. However, this logo is short-lived, only to be replaced by the current logo after barely 3 months.

September 2006: The Current Logo

The currently logo, bearing the letter “J” on the red background. The name of the site “JOLmy” appears in Liberal font below the logo. As JOLmy now consists of a personal website and a blog, it can be replaced with the name of the website like “James Ooi Online” and “The J Blog” when displayed in their respective sites.

11 November 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of JOLmy. Beginning today, the JOLmy 10th Anniversary logo will be displayed in James Ooi Online and The J Blog until 29 February 2008.

The J Blog will highlight some interesting facts about JOLmy from now till 29 February 2008.