Zippy’s life as a website
Summer 1997: Zippy’s first page, in living black-and-white (photo was a captured frame from a grayscale eyeball cam), resplendent in Times New Roman. This page lasted about a week, until our ISP’s free website trial ended. There was a patterned background, because it was 1997, but it has mercifully vanished. that we have since recovered and are happy to report that it was not nearly as bad as we had feared. See sample page.
Summer 1997: We move up. To GeoCities. Four pages plus a guestbook. The odometer-style hit counter on the front page is disguised as “Zippy’s lucky lotto numbers.”
February 1998: Zippy moves to his own domain and seems to recover the tips of his ears. By now, the coloring book, storybook and corgi info page have been added. Music becomes optional, much to the relief of those surfing at work. See sample page.
June 1999: The first Flash features appear.
May 2000: Zippyweb’s first spinoff, as Daisy gets her own site.
June 2000: Zippyweb gets a facelift. We update logo and add side navigation for most pages. In May of 2001, we make changes only a webmaster could love, including directory rearrangements (thank goodness for .htaccess), page layout simplification and the addition of a true index page, more or less. (Yes, sigh.) See sample page.
August, 2001: Logo is modified to match index graphic, wider implementation of stylesheets and we try a new version of a white-on-gray design we’d previously considered. See sample page.
February 2003. A full rewrite. Site is now constructed in strict XHTML and some PHP with a tableless CSS design. The site is more flexible, more accessible, automatically printer friendly, easier to maintain and forward-compatible—theoretically, anyway.
Somewhere in the middle of the 2010s: The site is currently retired but maintained. As time allows, we are attempting to replace the Flash interactives with HTML5, and giving up on that strict XHTML. We are also wishing we had bigger original images to have more responsive photo presentation.
July 2023: The Flash content is now as up to date and functional as can be expected, with the help of the Ruffle plug-in, the closest thing to a time machine we could find, and we thank the Ruffle team for helping to keep this Web relic alive.
