In 1994 I became interested in developing for the World Wide Web. I was intrigued with the idea of Web site design, since it merges the arts of graphics design and page layout with the logic of computer programming! Thanks to my job, I had already developed significant skills in graphics design, and had been writing production code in Microsoft QuickBasic during the 1980's until Windows made my real-mode programming skills all but obsolete. So I began the task of learning YAFPL (yet another f%#$ing programming language!), as we used to say.
Back then, the recommended method of learning to code HTML was to go to Web sites you liked, right-click the page, select "view source," and check out how they did what they did. Remember, this was before Java, PHP, ASP, etc. Everything back then was written in straight text. So I slowly gathered in code examples, right-clicked and downloaded a few basic graphics, got a few more graphics from an early graphics theme set Microsoft was giving away, and went to work building a site.
Although we had access to the Web at work, the US Air Force base in North Dakota where I lived at the time had no Internet Service Provider (ISP) available for personal use, so my budding Web site only existed as a collection of files in a directory on my PC at home. One day, a close friend and fellow member of the Dakrat PC Users Group dropped by the house to check out some computer upgrades I'd recently made, and in the course of talking about our latest computer exploits, I mentioned that I was working on a Web "Home Page" as we called them back then, and showed it to him. After clicking him around the site, I asked him what he thought about my Home Page. He said, "It's barely adequate!" So as an off-hand compliment to him, I change the lead-in from "Welcome to the Home Page of . . ." to "Welcome to the (barely adequate!) Home Page of . . ." We thought it was cute. So it stayed.
After retiring from the US Air Force in 1996, I relocated to my home city of Portland, Oregon, and acquired an account with start-up ISP Software Pipeline Internet, and in September 1996 I uploaded my Web site to SPNT.COM for the first time! It was live! And without any conscious decision being made the "barely adequate" moniker remained. (Note click here to see my first site! And please don't laugh too hard! It is quite crude! You can easily see the similarity between this site and its current version. However, make note that any links to pages outside of the site are no longer current. )
In June 1997, during a major revision to add frames and update the graphics, I decided to incorporate the moniker into the actual site name, which then became "Bruce Young's (barely adequate!) Home Page." Although that remained the text name of the site, later versions of the site header graphic depicted the moniker with a caret, as if someone had written it in after the fact (which, of course, I had!):
This logo followed the site through a move to Excite@Home, when I moved to broadband in October 2000, and then another short-notice forced move in December 2001 when AT&T Broadband Internet (ATTBI) bought out Excite's ISP business. Each time, the move forced the site to take on a completely different universal resource locator (URL), making it hard for visitors to find it.
After the dust settled on the ATTBI move in December 2001, having had to change the Web site's address (not to mention my e-mail address!) twice in one year, I decided my Internet presence needed a more permanent home, and I began to research what it would take to set up the Web site and e-mail accounts in thier own domain. My first decision was choosing what domain name to register, and the answer came almost without thinking: BarelyAdequate of course! Why mess with a good thing?! The next step was deciding which Top-level Domain (TLD) to host it on. Like almost everyone, my first inclination was to purchase a domain on the COM TLD. Unfortunately, a quick Whois search revealed that BarelyAdequate.com was already registered at the time (to a bowling alley in Louisiana, God knows why!), so COM was out. Since I wasn't going to be an ISP or other network provider, NET was out. And since this site is a "one-man show," ORG, which was intended for organizations, sounded pretentious! However, ICANN had just recently opened several new domains and the INFO TLD was an excellent match, since passing out information is the core purpose of this site! So, in January 2001, I registered a domain on the INFO TLD, secured a virtual host, and BarelyAdequate.info was live! The ATTBI address was redirected to the domain, just in case previous visitors came looking for it, and was later used again when ATTBI was sold to Comcast!
My daughter's family has enjoyed one of the unintended side benefits of my owning a domain. Until recently, her husband was in the US Army, and they lead a typical military family's vagabond lifestyle, moving to a new duty station every year or two, and having to change ISPs each time in the process. However, I set up e-mail accounts for all of them on my domain, so no matter where they moved to, they kept their same e-mail addresses, and — more importantly! — the same Outlook settings! I have since also added my mother and one my sisters to the domain, so it's truly become a family affair!
Since the site was set up on the domain, it has seen several changes, but they have no longer impacted my readers, due to the permanence of the domain name:
- In October 2002, the US TLD opened up, and I registered the BarelyAdequate.us domain and forwarded it to the main site.
- In Jan 2003, the site saw a virtual host change, after the previous host locked me out from FTP'ing into my site for over a month! Except for it being down for a few hours while the DNS servers caught up with the change, the site remained live throughout this challenge, even if it wasn't updated for over a month!
- In May 2003 BarelyAdequate.com opened up and I registered it (Hooray! I finally got it!) and it now forwards to the main site as well!
- In 2005, ATTBI merged withf Comcast and once again, my ISP changed domain names, and the "free" Web address and e-mail account that came with it were renamed yet again. But now that its on its own domain, BarelyAdequate.info was unaffected, and the e-mail addresses used by myself and extended family remain undisturbed, since they aren't associated in any way with my ISP!
- Several years later I had to kick Comcast to the curb in 2008 when performance started to suffer. I went over to Qwest when their new LightSpeed fiber-to-the-pole service came to my neighborhood. However, BarelyAdequate's Web site and e-mail still chug along unaffected, and the fact that they would was a big motivator to make the switch.
- Finally (so far!), I had to move my ISP back to Comcast's Xfinity (my daughter's choice!) when we made our latest move to North Bethany, Oregon.
