Calakron.com: From Notepad Nights to Nostalgia Blog

Welcome to Calakron.com — again.

If you’re new here, Calakron might sound like some mysterious piece of sci-fi tech. For me, it started as something much simpler: two teenagers in Keokuk, Iowa, hand-coding websites in Notepad, uploading files over dial-up, and feeling like we were quietly wiring our little corner of the world into the future.

Today, Calakron has been reborn as my internet nostalgia and web-dev blog — a place to remember how the web used to feel, and to unpack the tech behind it in a way that’s both geeky and approachable. But before we talk about where we’re going, I want to talk about where this all started.

Keokuk High School, iMac G3s, and the Sound of Dial-Up

I started building websites around 2003 at Keokuk High School, jumping onto any computer I could get my hands on:

Those colorful iMac G3s with the translucent shells. (Loved the look, mildly confused by the circular mouse.)
Dell OptiPlex boxes humming away in classrooms and the library.
And, of course, the family computer at home, where everyone shared one machine — and where getting online meant listening to that unforgettable dial-up modem screech.

If you never experienced dial-up: it was the price of admission to the early web — a series of beeps, static, and digital noise while your modem negotiated with your ISP over a phone line. You couldn’t use the phone and the internet at the same time. Someone picking up the phone could knock you offline. It was chaotic. It was annoying. It was… kind of magical.

JIJ Web & the Birth of Calakron

In high school, two friends — Ian and Jimmy — and I founded JIJ Web Services Network, which lives on today as JIJ Web at jijweb.com. It was our little web empire before we had any idea what the word startup even meant.

A bit later, my friend Chris and I founded Calakron as a small web development service for local people who wanted a website. No frameworks. No WordPress. No drag-and-drop builders.

Here’s what “web development” looked like for us back then:

Open Notepad (yes, the plain text editor).
Type out raw HTML and CSS line by line.
Maybe sprinkle in some JavaScript if we were feeling fancy.
Save files as index.html, style.css, and upload them via FTP.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is basically how you manually moved your website files from your computer to the hosting server. Picture dragging files into a remote folder and hoping you didn’t overwrite the wrong thing.

My favorite books weren’t novels — they were programming books. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, CGI scripts… I was that kid reading O’Reilly manuals for fun.

Web 1.0: When the Internet Felt Smaller (and Weird in the Best Way)

The early web was a strange and wonderful place. Today, everything is algorithm-driven, optimized, and branded. Back then, it felt more like walking through a neighborhood of hand-painted houses where everybody’s front yard looked different.

Some obscure (and not-so-obscure) relics you’ll see me talking about here:

CGI-Bin & Perl Scripts
Before we had polished platforms and APIs, a lot of “dynamic” sites ran off tiny programs in a server folder called /cgi-bin/.
- Want a guestbook? CGI script.
- Want a mail form? CGI script.
- Want a basic counter that pretended to be an “access log”? CGI script.
Hit Counters
Those little “You are visitor #000237” badges at the bottom of the page.
Completely meaningless, wildly inaccurate, absolutely essential.
Webrings
A webring was like a group hug for websites. A bunch of similar sites (say, “90s anime fans” or “personal blogs”) would join a ring, and each member showed a widget with “Previous | Next | Random” links.
It was an early, human-curated recommendation engine before social media and search dominated discovery.
Under Construction GIFs
Why quietly update your site when you could plaster it with animated yellow road signs, blinking lights, and a little guy digging with a shovel?
Half the web was “under construction,” but honestly, that was part of the charm.
Marquees & Blinking Text
<marquee> and <blink> were HTML tags that did exactly what they sound like:
- <marquee> made text scroll across the screen.
- <blink> made it flash on and off like a cheap neon sign.
  Today, they’re deprecated, but back then they were like free special effects for your page.
Framesets
Sites would split the browser window into multiple sections (frames) — the menu in one pane, the content in another. It was clunky, confusing, and broke bookmarking… but it felt futuristic at the time.

That era wasn’t just about nostalgia; it was about learning by doing, copying and tweaking code, and feeling an immediate sense of ownership over what you created. View Source was our best friend.

So… What Is Calakron.com Now?

Today, Calakron.com is my personal corner of the web where I:

Tell stories from the early 2000s web — both my own and the broader internet culture.
Explain old tech in modern language — what CGI was, why FTP mattered, how people built sites before frameworks and CMSs took over.
Mix nostalgia with practical dev talk — how the principles from Web 1.0 still shape good web design today: simplicity, clarity, and actually caring about the person on the other side of the screen.

You can expect:

Deep dives into old tools and techniques (and how you can still play with them today).
Reflections on how building sites in Notepad shaped the way I think as a developer now.
Occasional rants about modern web bloat — from the point of view of someone who remembers when a 100KB page was “heavy.”

Why Bother Remembering Any of This?

Because the early web was human.

It was messy, hand-built, and sometimes broken — but it felt like people, not platforms, were in charge. Remembering that era isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about reminding ourselves that:

You don’t need a massive stack to create something meaningful.
You can still learn a lot by opening a text editor and writing raw HTML.
The web is at its best when it empowers individuals, not just corporations.

Welcome Back to Calakron

So this is Calakron.com of today:
Part personal history, part technical storytelling, part love letter to the dial-up days.

If you remember webrings, guestbooks, and animated GIF buttons that said “Best viewed in Netscape,” you’re in the right place.

If you don’t remember any of that, you’re still in the right place — I’ll explain it as we go.

Either way: welcome. Let’s plug back into Web 1.0 for a while.

Calakron