Ode to Lindsay Smith

Once upon a time, when the interlux was a much smaller place, young people used to buy domains and then "host" other people's personal websites by giving them their own directory and the password to the ftp account. One wishing to be hosted had to first prove that she was worthy of being hosted, usually by having a cool-looking site on a free hosting site like Angelfire, and hope that a hoster with whom she had "applied" would let her on board.

In nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, both Matt and I were approved and hosted by one Lindsay Smith of offcentre.net. At the time, we lived two time-zones away from each other and, of course, had two very separate web sites. In fact, neither of us knew the other was hoping to be hosted by Lindsay until we were both approved. Both of us were very excited at the time. Neither of us can remember why now.

Lindsay's site was large and content heavy with one section or another always under construction with promises that it would all be up and working soon. She was constantly redesigning the site, often before the previous version was finished. The web archive's last recorded version of the site was version 7.

And now the site is gone. No one owns the domain anymore. It makes me a little sad. Even though I rarely visited, I always knew that if I typed offcentre.net into my address bar, there would be Lindsay's somewhat-finished site with already-past due dates still posted on the homepage. Not anymore.

In rememberance of Lindsay "Red" Smith, I present to you now this link to what I can only assume was Lindsay's own free-hosted site before she decided to take matters into her own hands and host her site herself.

UPDATE: I also found her current journal in case you are curious. She was the first Lindsay Smith on a search on myspace too. Makes me feel like the internet is small again, like the good old days.