My Website Is Dead

From 1992 through 2007 I was an adjunct lecturer, then senior lecturer, in a university honors program. I team taught a couple of honors seminars with a friend, who is carrying on now without me. Because we both had these day jobs, working at a federal agency, we were keen to make use of computers and the Internet to assist us with our teaching, with administering the courses and staying in touch with our students. We were also both caught up in the emergence of the so-called new technology. In 1992 the Internet was all the rage, of course, and the World Wide Web was beginning to be talked about by those in the know. (You can read a little history of W3 here.) Gopher and FTP were still the dominant ways of exchanging data on the Internet, but all of that changed in February of 1993 when some kid at NCSA named Marc Andreesen released the alpha version of a program he called Mosaic. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even before I installed Mosaic I was creating my first website at Netcom. It was very primitive, written with basic html using a text editor and a text browser call Lynx. Netcom offered fairly sophisticated shell accounts running a version of UNIX on a network of Sun computers. It was a bit more challenging and exciting than CompuServe or America Online, and much more fun, I thought. When I started teaching, I quickly got myself a shell account on the university's system, and not long afterwards I created a more sophisticated personal website, one more suited to graphical browsing.

My principal use of the website was to collect links, mostly about computing and teaching online. One of my web pages, Teaching with Electronic Technology, became something of a hit among other teachers, with hundreds and eventually thousands of other sites linking to it. For a time I was obsessed with keeping this page up to date, adding links to all the latest websites on teaching with technology, humanities computing, etc. I was convinced that mine was one of the best online resources for teachers at all levels. Someone from the American Association of School Librarians even got in touch with me and asked me to write a web profile on my site and my experience teaching with technology.

Eventually, the enthusiasm died down. Teaching with technology became fairly commonplace. My updates to my website became much more infrequent. Broken links were not updated; some sites disappeared. I went on with the rest of my life. In the fall of 2007 I taught my last honors seminar, and now a year later, my account at the university has been turned off, and with it my website and the page called Teaching with Electronic Technology. You can still find links to it on Google, and you can see some lingering images of it on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine if you look for http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mlhall/. There are examples going back as far as 1997. You can see how the site changed with changing tastes in web design and some slight growth in my own meager abilities with html.

But now it's dead. Or nearly dead. I copied the last version of the website to my personal web space at my present internet provider, and I've kept a copy on my flash drive. But one day these too will pass into oblivion. Electronic data is so fragile and ephemeral. And yet it holds on in fading images and fragmentary bits saved here and there to linger for a while on servers and hard drives scattered about the Internet on the World Wide Web.