PlanetMike.com started out as a personal web page for Mike on the Blacksburg Electronic Village in late 1995. At that point, most surfing was done with Mosaic or Netscape Navigator 1.1. Computers which could run Windows were considered to be blazing fast if they were a 486 chip running at least 75 mhz. Being able to display 256 colors was about as good as you could get. My allotment of space at the BEV was limited to one page (yes, one page!). I believe there may have even been a limit as to how large the file could be. And to be able to use graphics, you had to use the clipart available elsewhere on the BEV server.
In 1996 Virginia Tech realized they would be in front of the learning curve if they provided web server space to their students. So each student was allocated 500K of disk space for their own files. So I migrated my site to Virginia Tech and learned how to incorporate graphics and multiple pages into a site.
In 1997, Virginia Tech increased the disk quota that each student could have to a whopping one megabyte! So I redesigned my site again.
Despite the doubling of disk space, I was continually trying to cram more and more stuff into my site. I looked at using a free server, such as Geocities, but decided I should bite the bullet and pay for a true web site. In April 1998, I moved the site from Virginia Tech to SimpleNet. I kept the site design the same at this move.
In March 1999, I wanted to get my own domain name so I would have more flexibility in case I ever changed hosts. I started looking to see what was available. Of course, all of the variations of my name were already taken. At one point I thought of MikeZone.com, and it was actually available. But by the time I got around to actually registering it, it was gone. So when my wife and I brainstormed PlanetMike.com, we grabbed it. 🙂 .
In January 2000, I updated the site again. PlanetMike.com now has its own unique look.
In April 2000, I moved the site to vservers.com, which offered me many more options with my web site.
In March 2002, I moved the site to RackSpace.com, which is a bit more expensive than Vservers, but has a ton more disk space, bandwidth, processing speed, and other capabiltiies.
Starting in November 2003 (and completing in May 2004), I redesigned the site again, to make the content more flexible, and to implement standard HTML and cascading style sheet code. I also added the blog using Blosxom.
In 2007 I again changed web hosts to ServerBeach. I started using the WordPress Content Management system to manage the site. WordPress allows me to easily change the look of the entire site, so I am no longer keeping track of which themes I use.