Ancient Web: Ellie Crystal Worried About Vanishing Homepages in 2003

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

In 2003, a webmaster looked around and noticed that personal websites were already vanishing. The essay survived, along with the vast website that prompted the thought.

Read What's Happened to All the Websites?.

Ellie Crystal dated this brief reflection July 2003. She had been publishing Crystalinks since August 1995, initially as a home for spiritual writings, metaphysical research, and whatever else she wanted to investigate. On the new page she remembered predicting that the Internet would fill with personal books, poems, businesses, confessions, and experiments.

Not all of those sites, she observed, were lasting. People lost interest, ran into hosting expenses, faced personal troubles, or could no longer maintain their pages. Some sites had provided a kind of public therapy: individuals wrote about painful experiences, hoped their words might help others, and sometimes disappeared from the Web afterward.

The Internet was already changing underneath its authors

Crystal thought the technical barriers to publishing had fallen. Her essay contrasts the old dial-up environment with quicker connections and describes people gravitating from long text toward pictures and video. She believed the rise of simple web-design tools also changed the work available to professional designers.

One detail is too good to lose: she recalls someone offering to charge her a dollar for every hyperlink created in 1995. That motivated her, she says, to teach herself HTML. It is her personal account, not an independently verified invoice, but it communicates why editing a homepage once seemed like a specialized service.

The essay also makes sweeping predictions about the growth of the Internet and the way people will communicate. They should be read as Crystal's thoughts in 2003 rather than as objective measurements of online behavior.

Her later twenty-fifth-anniversary note describes the website's early hosted incarnation and its move to a dedicated domain. The 1995 archive provides another look at the project when it was younger.

This subject differs from Crystalinks' Atlantis compilation and the previously covered Colosseum page. Its focus is not occult speculation but an early webmaster's first-person record of changing online publishing conditions.

At a time when many people now remember the early Web as a finished era, this 2003 essay reminds us that participants were already worrying about losing it.

Read the original 2003 reflection.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.