Ancient Web: WebWinds Filed Skating Photos Beside World Webcams

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There was a time when a webcam pointed at a mountain, an electronic greeting card, and a photograph of a figure skater could reasonably share a homepage. Tracy Marks's WebWinds kept that tradition going.

Visit WebWinds.

Marks's surviving personal-site index identifies April 3, 1997 as the beginning of its visitor counter, and a June 2006 update appears at the bottom. It leads visitors toward webcam tours of several continents, electronic greeting-card indexes, photo galleries, web-training resources, and a remarkable amount of mythology and history. The site is not a single-topic reference work; it is a public record of one person's changing obsessions.

Its own plea for help says the extended network once comprised around 1,500 public-service pages and more than 5,000 links. Those are the author's estimates, not an independently audited index, but the scale is visible in the navigation. Keeping that many old destinations working would be a career, not an evening chore.

A rink-side scrapbook that became an archive

The strongest surviving subsection may be Marks's figure-skating photo gallery. Its December 2006 version indexes pictures from the late 1990s and early 2000s, including exhibitions, Stars on Ice, Champions on Ice, and competitive events in New England. The page says it points to more than 1,000 of her own photographs, with galleries dispersed between WebWinds, Windweaver, a 50megs host, and a later SmugMug account.

The archive names specific skaters and occasions rather than merely labeling pictures 'ice skating.' It records Michelle Kwan at 1998 and 1999 events, Katia Gordeeva and Ilia Kulik in 2000, Sasha Cohen at Champions on Ice, and pages for Kristi Yamaguchi, Tara Lipinski, and many others.

Marks also explains the practical limits of this hobby. The photo page discusses copyright restrictions at skating shows, whether prints could be sold, and the costs of maintaining an archive of physical photographs. Visitors are asked not to republish the images without permission. That request is as much a part of the historical record as the photographs themselves.

The top-level site spreads outward in every direction: astronomy webcards, ancient mythology, Viktor Frankl, Botticelli, California webcams, Photoshop lessons, and nature photography. There is no machine-learned recommendation engine imposing a tidy identity on its owner.

A previous Ancient Web article covered WebWinds' mythology chat-room pages. This surviving homepage and photography directory tell a different story: the sheer range of work an individual once chose to organize under one address.

Browse Tracy Marks's figure-skating photograph index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.