I have had this website, in one form or another, since the mid-1990s — back when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. It began not as a “website” at all but as files on a university server while I was a student at USF. By 2003 I was already calling the site’s design “the fifth rendition of the original,” and it has been through many more since.
Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I can actually see those old designs again. So here is a walk through three decades of this little corner of the web — from a student account in Tampa, through half a dozen redesigns, a few years when I lost the domain entirely, and back again.
1995–2001 — a page on a university server
Before there was a domain, there was a student account — my first website. Over
the years it lived at a few USF addresses (suntan.eng.usf.edu/~birla,
eng.usf.edu/~birla, and finally www.csee.usf.edu/~birla), with a matching
email at birla@suntan.eng.usf.edu. The earliest incarnations were never
archived; the capture above is from 1999. In my own words at the time:
Hello there… welcome to my home on the web. This page is sitting on an Engineering server at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. I finished my undergrad last May and have started my Masters… I also like to build model rockets and shoot them off, never to see them again… Bye bye, and enjoy surfing the web. I am off to discover strange new lands!
The same account also hosted my imagepro/ folder — image-processing coursework
(Gaussian blurs, edge detectors, Hough transforms) that became the seed of the
ImagePro software still on this site today. By 2001 this URL simply
redirected to my new domain. (Add a memory here: what did it feel like to publish
your first page to the web?)
1997–2000 — Europa: searching for signs of life
Meanwhile, at home, a second site ran on a Pentium-era Linux box in my apartment named Europa — an AMD K5 with 64 MB of RAM running Red Hat, doubling as the Internet gateway and file server for my Windows machines: my first self-hosted website. The site was themed around Europa, Jupiter’s ice moon, right down to the tagline (“searching for signs of life…”) and an animated dividing-cell GIF next to the news column. It had a “system status” page, a caller-ID log fed by a scavenged modem and some C code, and offered shell accounts to anyone who wanted to learn Linux. The server dates to the late ’90s; the files that survive are the 2000 rebuild — its own news feed proudly announces the day PHP and MySQL were installed. Unlike almost everything else here, this one never made it into the Wayback Machine — but the files survived, and in 2026 I dusted them off and put the original back online, missing pieces reconstructed. (Add a memory here: what did that first server mean to you?)
2000 — “begin exploring…”
The earliest capture the archive has of the domain. This was a personal home page
in the truest late-‘90s sense: a place to browse and download the software I had
written, list my hobbies (model rockets, home automation with Linux and X10,
astronomy, photography), and say hello. Note the email address —
birla@bigfoot.com. (Add a memory here: what were you using to build these pages
back then?)
2002–2004 — “What’s New?”
This is the era that looks most like a proper personal site. A left sidebar (Profile & Bio, Projects, Favorites), a reverse-chronological “What’s New?” feed — essentially a blog before I called it one — and little flourishes like a Picture of the Day and a hand-curated “Recent Clicks” list. This is also where the Canon D30 review and the early travelogues first appeared.
2005–2008 — the redesign
A more grown-up look: a photographic banner (that’s the I-4/I-275 “malfunction junction” I used to complain about), a slim navigation bar, and a tidy Site Navigation sidebar. Under the hood this was the hand-rolled PHP site I only recently finished migrating into the current setup.
2012–2017 — the WordPress years
Eventually I did what almost everyone did and moved to WordPress. Social icons, categories, a blogroll, “random photos” in the sidebar — very much of its time. Most of the long-form technical posts still on the site today (the caching image server, swimming pool chemistry, the OpenSIPS write-ups) were written in this period.
2018–2024 — the lost years
And then I lost the domain. Life got busy, a renewal slipped, and sumitbirla.com
was snapped up the moment it lapsed. For several years the Wayback Machine shows
it as a parking page full of “sponsored listings,” and later a domain-broker
landing page offering my own name back to me for $3,420 (or a convenient
$114/month). For a while it even redirected to unrelated junk. It is a strange
feeling to watch the address you have used since your twenties turn into someone
else’s billboard.
The ending is anticlimactic in the best way: in July 2026 the domain mysteriously turned up as available to register — no broker, no auction, no $3,420 ransom — and I picked it up on Cloudflare for about $10, the ordinary price of an ordinary domain. Whoever was squatting on it had apparently let it lapse. I did not ask questions; I just registered it before anyone else could.
2025–present — rebuilt, then reclaimed
I didn’t wait for the .com to come home before rebuilding. While it was still held
hostage, I set up shop at sumitbirla.me and rebuilt the site from scratch — this
time as a static site generated with Jekyll. No database,
no plugins to patch, no trackers, system fonts, and client-side search. It loads
instantly and should be readable for another thirty years without much fuss. I also
spent a good while dragging the old content forward out of the FTP/PHP/WordPress
eras so nothing got left behind in the move. When sumitbirla.com finally came
back in July 2026, the finished site simply moved in, and the .me now redirects
to the address where this whole story started.
Postscript — the guestbook came back
One casualty of all those moves deserved a better ending: the guestbook. From 2000 to 2010 visitors signed this site — friends, family, strangers from Russia and Mozambique who liked my software, my mom (“many things are beyond my understanding. I’ll learn from you”) — and at some point the MySQL database holding all of it was simply lost.
In July 2026 I got the messages back, reassembling them from old flat files found on the server and 64 Wayback Machine snapshots taken over the decade. The recovered entry that stings the sweetest is the oldest one — me, October 16, 2000, apparently after an earlier data loss: “Where have all the messages gone?”
It took twenty-six years, but I finally have an answer. They’re all here, preserved for good this time.
Thirty years, half a dozen redesigns, one multi-year detour through the domain resale market, and the same person tinkering behind all of it. If you have kept a website going for a long time, go pull it up in the Wayback Machine — it is a wonderful, slightly embarrassing time capsule.