09/01/2026
The Wayback Machine came for me tonight. 😂
I went looking for my old MySpace because I wanted a specific photo. Couldn’t find it, but apparently the internet kept other receipts.
In 2003, at 17, I was hand-coding FR34K.net: my blog, forums, mailing list, affiliate program, visitor counter, PayPal donations, and a whole network of sites I designed and ran.
No WordPress. No Squarespace. Just manually coding pages, Photoshopping graphics, breaking s**t, and figuring out how to fix it. 😂
Best discovery? An April 2003 post announcing I GOT MY PROM DRESS and uploaded pictures. Yes, I still have them. 😂
Then there’s 2007 me on an osCommerce developer forum, fighting PHP/HTML and my database after spending “many an hour photoshopping” a template:
“What the heck? I’m pulling my hair out.” Twenty-three years later and ain’t much changed. 😂
I’m sad most of the graphics weren’t preserved because we were doing some WILD s**t circa 2003… hand-drawn layouts, horizontal-scrolling websites, SO MANY IFRAMES. 😱🤣
And now I genuinely wonder: where did that worldwide community of girls teaching ourselves web design go? We had affiliates, “cliques,” link networks… we were building authority links before SEO existed. 😂
How many of us turned those weird little internet empires into careers? Anyway, when I say I’ve been doing this a long-ass time, apparently I have receipts. 💀
And I absolutely dare not search every other domain I owned. 😬
