My personal site has always been an intermittent work-in-progress. By intermittent, I mean, whatever random time I happened to have an idea of something to do with it. Sometimes lots of stuff would happen over a week... and nothing would happen for months. An expression of the wanes and waxes of my creativity.
The very first incarnation of my site came online in late 1997. AOL had a tool for creating what we'd call a "Profile Page" today. Back then, it was considered a website. My connection was a rather slow 2400 baud, but it didn't stop me from uploading all sorts of stupid graphics to put on it. Through 1998 I learned the basics of classic HTML.... all those horrible <font> and <blink> tags... Stuff we best forget.
The dot-com boom came, and provided me my first opportunity to own a domain: jwooden271.net. Namezero was a company that provided free domain registrations in exchange for banner ads. Seems like you could get anything for free for a banner, at least until 2001. Even I ran silly ads on my site in an attempt to generate revenue. Of course, I had very little traffic and thus never earned anything. I still look at Adwords on personal blogs with skepticism.
Early 2000s I started getting into desktop coding and sites cropped up for my various projects. The project with real staying power was OfficeHero and its quirky word processor Typo. I maintained the app for the better part of the decade. Several thousand people downloaded it over the years and a few still write to me about them using it. It could generate an "Instant Bibliography" long before easybib caught on.
Around 2003 I started experimenting with self-hosting. A number of registrars offered free .info domains and I hopped on the bandwagon. A dynamic DNS service synced my IP to the domain. Of course, few ever visited, so I never had concern about bandwidth. Thus, wolf.jwooden271.info was born. The site was powered by dokuwiki. People I knew would occasionally deface it, but it gave me something to do.
A chap I met on Second Life gave my my first hosting account with shell access. "wolf" was no longer to be self-hosted. It became a blog, powered by a crude php script I wrote. Version 1 was extra-crude, Version 2 "Viridian City" brought comments, handled by some simple (but elegant) AJAX magic. Didn't have any SQL tables at my disposal... everything was a system of plain text files. Around this time, Facebook started getting popular. People visiting my profile would occasionally click through. Finally, someone was watching!
One fateful day... October 31st, 2008... AOL shut down their website hosting service. My first website was gone, just shy of its 11th "birthday". By then, free website hosting was supplanted by Facebook and Myspace profiles. Not quite the same.
These days, "wolf" is a Drupal-based blog, hosted by Dreamhost. The site is still on a too-broke-for-shoestrings budget.