Because we can...

Before Al Gore

I was on the internet in the 80's, before the .com explosion, and before most people knew what it was. Back then you used a character based mail and news reader and that was about it. There were no streaming ads. Spam didn't exist. The World Wide Web consisted of educational institutions sharing acedemic research information. The phone company didn't provide a digital subscriber line (DSL), you dialed in using a modem attached to your telephone. Not suprisingly, internet porn was around then, in the alt.binaries news groups. But then pornography has always been one of the first industries to embrace a new media channel.

pigsmoke.com

In 2002 I built the original pigsmoke.com to showcase the brick barbecue pit I designed, and my penchant for traditional southern barbecue. It naturally extended to sharing my canoe trip experiences. And then of course, there has always been the music. Being a professional software developer made it natural for me to code my own html. Even then, most web experiences were still character based. At that time cheap personal web hosting packages ran about $20 a month and had limits on disk space and server bandwidth, with surcharges if you overran your monthly bandwidth alotment. You had to monitor your site statistics and be careful that you didn't attract too much traffic in a month. Today I'm paying about $3.50 a month and have unlimited server space and bandwidth.

But then I can also remember when all the telephone did was ring. It didn't run apps, it had a bell.

Why pigsmoke?

My original internet access was through a cooperative U.S. University network called bit.net. My email address was barbecue@bit.net. They had some kinda big snafu in their IT department and asked all their subscribers to reestablish their email accounts. When I went to re-do my account information someone else had already snarfed up "barbecue" so I had to pick another email handle. In a decidely uninspired moment of thought I chose "pigsmoke" because I felt it somehow contained a sense of cooking meat. Now I've grown kinda fond of it. If you google "pigsmoke", there I'll be, right at the top, all by myself, the only direct hit. Now, with my own domain I can have any email address I want.

Web Design

The web design template I used to build this was shamlessly taken from the Open Source Web Design free download site.