Ancient Web: CyBeRGaTa CeNTRaL Kept a 1994 Personal-Web Universe Open

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A personal homepage can be a portrait in links. Nancy's CyBeRGaTa CeNTRaL, identifying itself as online since 1994, is one of those wonderfully unedited portraits: cats, family, New Mexico, peace, and the things needed to build more webpages.

Visit CyBeRGaTa CeNTRaL.

The large front-page index leads to family photographs, a wedding album, childhood recipes, and genealogical research. Nancy's New Mexico roots appear in sections about the Río Abajo, early López families, historical settlers of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and connections with European ancestors.

The site also records specific vacations. There are Seattle photographs from July 2000 and a Grand Canyon slideshow from August 2002. Readers can follow Nancy's interests well beyond those trips through grateful-dead bears, vintage New Mexico postcards, cats, political thoughts, and an enormous set of favorite links.

A webmaster also provided the tools

One of the page's most revealing sections is titled 'Web Page Helpers & Other Things I've Created to Help Myself Which Might Be Helpful To Others.' It includes HTML color codes, a meta-tag maker, instructions for making a photo cube, tables-within-tables examples, decorative page backgrounds, and special characters that can be entered with keyboard codes.

The cat-animation gallery is advertised as having more than fifty pages of animated cats. It represents a distinct collection within the larger personal site, alongside a memorial-like series of pages devoted to the actual cats who shared Nancy's life.

The main index contains a wonderfully period warning about graphics-heavy links. It also sends visitors to an old blog, personal photo sets, a Grateful Dead bear collection, and one of those extraordinary 'out of the ordinary' link libraries that could occupy an enthusiast for a whole afternoon.

The 1994 date is the webmaster's own claim, not a guarantee that each surviving page has retained its original layout. Some pages have been revised, while other outbound links lead toward services whose status has changed.

Still, the site's continuity is visible in its accumulated layers. New publishing formats did not require discarding the family photographs, HTML instructions, and decorative relics that made the original homepage personal.

Explore Nancy's complete site map and the cat-animation collection.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.