The first Janicek.com post was on February 10, 2002. I actually bought Janicek.com on October 9, 2001. I decided I wanted a website where I could journal about Elise’s and my life together as a newly-married couple. I’d seen other online journals and thought that was a great idea. I didn’t know these journals were called “blogs,” and that there was software that made blogging easy, organized, and searchable. Given that I was a web designer at the time, I built Janicek.com from scratch by using only HTML and CSS. My “blog” was totally static and my index.html was manually downloaded and uploaded anytime I wanted to update the website with a new story. And I’m pretty sure I was doing all of this in Microsoft FrontPage at the time.
The original Janicek.com had some pretty good stories, too. I remember I’d written all about our wedding and our honeymoon. And I’m pretty sure I wrote about losing my job as a web designer. That was my first job out of college and I was happy and excited to be a working man, working in tech. I worked for a start-up dot-com in Austin Texas. And the dot-com bubble burst.
Newly married and out of a job in the tech space with the rest of the techies across the country.
At some point I discovered MoveableType and installed it on my server. Then Janicek.com became a true blog. For the life of me I could never find the old static HTML version of Janicek.com that lived from October 2001 to February 2002. It was on a hard drive somewhere and I guess it just got lost somewhere in the shuffle of hard drives throughout the years. And I have no idea why I wouldn’t have copies those old static stories and pasted them into the new Janicek.com that was running MoveableType. Maybe those stories still live somewhere, buried in a folder on a hard drive that’s shoved in a drawer in the home office. Perhaps I just haven’t looked hard enough.
What’s funny is that nineteen years and a day ago, the first post on Janicek.com was about searching for a job, saving money and moving out of Austin. I’d posted about having a second interview coming up with Scott & White and we were entertaining the idea of moving from Austin to Temple.
I don’t have any second interviews lined up but will be looking for a job again soon. History repeats itself.