Welcome to Peregrine Gobelin

Intro

There are four kinds of sites on the web. The first to appear were of the type that provide information, help you find something or answer questions. These are your basic search engines, FAQs, research articles and news sites. Then came sites which were created by individuals about themselves. These are your basic homepages for everyone who got the hunch to "get with it". Then came the money makers with sites which try to get you to buy something, e-commerce. They sell tangibles (groceries, books, semiconductor equipment) or offer services (online banking, porn, movie rental). Finally, sites which foster a community appeared. They help you belong because of your hobby, ethnic background, taste for tofu or toes. These started out as extensions of IRC rooms (chat forums) and they often act as portals to such features now.

History

Peregrine Gobelin began in the spring of 1993 as my first attempt at HTML coding at RPI. Having just learned LaTeX the year before, HTML was like playing with Lego's when you're used to rebuilding car engines.

The first site (version 1.0 without a name) was very basic and consisted mostly of pictures of Rex, my parent's dalmation, so it would have fit in the homepage category described above. Initial code was created on a university access Sun Sparc station running SunOS.

Version 2.0 came about in late1995 and was more of the same with fancier coding since this new Netscape browser had been introduced. The site was now hosted by Lehigh University where I went to grad school and I started playing with simple graphics design elements like the title banner below.

Rex was growing up quickly and there were pictures to document this. The site gained the codename "Rex" due to the overabundance of content about him. This version was coded on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX.

Version 3.0 was the first one where I had to finance the host myself. The files left the Lehigh servers and have been available through Toast.net ever since. It was also the first site where I didn't code the HTML directly since, to get with the times, I bought Pagemill. Pouring out hard cash for presence on the web made me realize that I truly enjoyed this stuff. The site gained the codeword "Impala" although I don't know exactly how this came about. I was using that name to play Jet Fighter 2 (this game is so old that I was only able to find a link for JF3) at the time and perhaps it somehow crossed over. Some of the elemets from version 3.0 are still here today but that was the only time I used frames in my website. That's the screenshot of the main page below. This version was created on a Fujitsu Lifebook 435dx running Win95 and was the first one to contain images captured digitally (as opposed to scanning in prints) using a Kodak DC210 camera.