I’m moving all old posts from my previous sites to the present davidfeng.com site.

Does this warrant in itself a post? Probably not… because it’s irrelevant to most of you (especially if this is your first visit to the site). But… actually, yes, it might make a little bit of sense if you have been following me since the very early years.

In 1996, Mr D’Arcy, my computer teacher (read: Mac teacher), encouraged everyone to create, using basically “raw HTML code” at that time, their own web sites. I did mine, and the only thing I was happy about was text that blinked. Today, if you do that on the Interwebs of 2014, your design is in essence put on Cyber Death Row. (No sane soul does blinking text any more!)

I had no idea why Mr D’Arcy liked my page as one of his favourites — it must have been the blinking text, right? Grand stuff… well, back in the day, it certainly was. This page came out probably 3 years before Google — in the weirdest of all names, I named it based on my then-Hanyu Pinyin given name and the word Net (a la Internet): yaNet (yep, it sure was case-sensitive).

(I’ll leave you to pronounce that on your own — I do not have an officially approved pronunciation here…)

So as I’m getting ready to hit That Great Big Twenty in terms of online presence, I figured I’d have to move quickly before 30 September 2016, which is when (I think) the site first made it online, and get those old pages back up again — as much as I can recover (especially recover sense in them). You see, on that date in 1996, without me knowing too much about it, Mr D’Arcy fell in love with the site and hosted it on the school’s web server for the low price of zero. (The Internet Archives / Wayback Machine currently holds copies of these pages as “early” as 12 April 1997.)

And internic.net was not informed… (which was less of a big deal, since my site was not on its own separate domain!)

I do admit that a 14-year-old “thinks different” than a 34-year old, but I have never been a fan of secretly rewriting history. Some of the restored pages (which will include quite a few from my 2005 Raccolta Online site) will, obviously, have to be modified “to suit the times” — but you’ll be told that “minor changes were made to this post based on the original”. Some things aren’t for sale (and won’t suffer massive mods): personal views, independent opinions, and the willingness to be different (without being too different to the extent you get loads of others mad), so I’ll keep previous posts unmodded as much as possible.

The e-move will happen gradually — there are no clues as it’s probably not the best thing to send out a press release every time a page is recovered! Within about two years, though, you’d have experienced something quite interesting “weird and wonderful” (which was how they called my very first site): the whole world of David Feng since 1996 in one site.

Archive.org, breathe easy. If you can’t take care of my stuff, I’ll do it on my own…