Well, this is my first official post on the ZilchSpace blog.
You may be asking what is ZilchSpace? Some people may actually remember the first generation of ZilchSpace.
So, how do I explain ZilchSpace? The short story is that ZilchSpace was my first personally hosted website.
The long story is that in college, I got the bug for the web. I was introduced to website design in 1998 by my my suitemates in 1444B Jameson Hall at Cornell University. I used to have a really great picture of them, but no longer have it (details later). So Cornell had a policy that every student could get 5MB of hosted space on the “CU People” server. 5Meg at that time meant some people like my friend Alvin Mai (serious link) would post every single 80’s midi and every moving gif he could find. 
Other people like my more serious pal, Jenna Ray Burrell, could post their resumes and the papers they’d published with various CU professors. Or, most people, like my friend Kiyo posted one page and then promptly forgot about their site.
I had a page too, though it was not yet ZilchSpace. ZilchSpace came about a few years later while living off campus.
I wanted to figure out how the web worked; not how email floated around and made it to the right inbox, but just how an internet site functioned, what made it tick. I installed Apache on my computer, opened up port 80 on my firewall and ZilchSpace was born. Initially the site was real simple, a few static HTML pages and some simple java scripts.
As I found a new need – hosting digital pictures – I would study more about the technology and build more complex parts of the site. zThumbs was one of my first creations which let me put digital pictures in a standard file structure on my computer, but then it would dynamically create web pages and thumbnails of the photos on my website (if anyone still has a copy of that script, I’d love to get it back). zGuestbook was another creation when I wanted to have a guestbook for the site; it was signed mostly by my buddies Jay and Marty who wrote multiple inappropriate things on there.
After about three years of hosting the site, collecting my digital photos, and building all the things I needed, my computer crashed and I lost it all; thus why I have no picture of my freshman year suite-mates, or any of college for that matter.
It has taken a few years to get over the trauma (sob, sob) but I’m finally up for having another site. But this time I’m going about it the right way. andyzilch.com/andyzilch.net/sarita-andy.com is hosted by godaddy.com who has daily backups and 24×7 service for a rather reasonable price. So welcome back to ZilchSpace.
