Back in the oldie timey days… no – farther back… In the days before Facebook, before MySpace even, there was a wonderful meeting place called Geocities. Everyone was making their own web sites. The wild west days of the interwebs began!
I was a single father and my kids and I started a family page. My son and I were very active with the game Ultima Online and I made a UO site. It was my main page of our Geocities page. The kids had a page each that I would help them edit (all hand written html back then).
As our hobbies grew, so did the page. I added model railroads, travel pics, and a huge section on pirates. Our family was also struggling Vaisnavas, so I added a section for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).
This took place over a few years and during this time Geocities was having issues and there were rumors of its possible closing. So, I got my own domain and moved everything to a new host. This allowed me to make a much larger site, and host our own e-mail server.
Other things started taking priority, my son and I both quit playing Ultima, I drifted away from the church, life got in the way, whatever – I had not touched the site since 2008. I kept paying for the domain because of sentimental reasons, and I was too lazy to change email addresses.
In early March 2022 I started chanting again. I also started looking for some good websites for association with other devotees. So far I have not found much, but will keep looking. But that encouraged me to take a look at my old dusty website.
I have the old site fully backed up offline, and accessible for my use. I do still use it as a reference for various things (it got quite large). None of the pages are really anything I need to share anymore, and the coding is antique. It was all written with Front Page, and a small amount of Claris Works. Optimized for IE4. Yeah… ancient history (if you know, you know).
Over the years, neglect and java script changes, messed up my menus, and the total abandonment of flash messed up some animations and games. I really loved flash… Instead of trying to recode an antique site, I decided to delete the entire site (I have my own backup so no loss), and start over with just an ISKCON blog.
The static pages (in the menu above) are from the old site. I did not write most of it, the information was taken off small flyers we used to hand out during street preaching. It is some good general information, so I want to leave it available (I have not seen those flyers in over a decade). The site took less than a day to get up and running on WordPress, and rewrite the old pages. Now it is time to start blogging.
I will be writing a blog as I see if I am going to get back into the devotional life. I am chanting, but so far that is all I am doing. I will blog my thoughts and problems along the way.
I was named after Sant Tukaram (that will be its own post later), and will add posts about him, his life, and his poetry. That was the original idea for the ISKCON section of the old site – it just never happened.
It may be slow going, but I hope to have some fun with this site. Hopefully you will enjoy it as well.
