websites through the years

Five websites I built between 1999 and 2013 — three lost when their hosts died and recovered from the Wayback Machine, two rescued from Blogger while still alive. A personal museum of the early web: <font> tags, hit counters, image maps and all — imperfections deliberately included; the curator's note below tells you what to expect inside.

NEW! Sign the guestbook by clicking here!

The hand-coded era · 1999 – 2006

welcome to @t@kee's homepage! - Microsoft Internet Explorer_ □ ✕
Screenshot of @t@kee's homepage, rainbow letters on black background
1999 – 2004

@t@kee's homepage

My personal homepage on FortuneCity: rainbow lettering, a picture gallery, travel pages, jokes and a guestbook. The hit counter and the news headlines box work again — rebuilt after their services died two decades ago.

FrontPage Express 2.0 members.fortunecity.com ICQ era

One photo has pointed at C:\My Documents\ since the day it was uploaded.

Read the plaque → Wayback original
AB GENEL MÜDÜRLÜĞÜ ANA SAYFA - Microsoft Internet Explorer_ □ ✕
Screenshot of the Türkiye–EU relations site with a map of Europe, Turkey highlighted in yellow
2001 – 2002

Türkiye–EU Relations · Undersecretariat of Foreign Trade

The EU affairs section of dtm.gov.tr, which I built and ran as its webmaster: legal texts of Türkiye–EU relations, free trade agreements, the customs union and trade statistics — some 130 pages of it.

FrontPage 4.0 windows-1254 www.dtm.gov.tr/AB

Somewhere on the map of Europe, one tiny spot is a secret link. Try Üsküdar.

Read the plaque → Wayback original
türkiye - ab karma parlamento komisyonu - Microsoft Internet Explorer_ □ ✕
Screenshot of the Turkey–EU Joint Parliamentary Committee site
2004 – 2006

Turkey–EU Joint Parliamentary Committee · TBMM

The Joint Parliamentary Committee's site at the Turkish Grand National Assembly, in four languages, with an archive of the committee's joint declarations and press releases from the accession-talks years.

FrontPage 3.0 iso-8859-9 tr · en · de · fr

“En iyi, Microsoft Internet Explorer ile görüntülenir.”

Read the plaque → Wayback original

The blog era · 2008 – 2013 rescued alive

Thoughtful thoughts - Mozilla Firefox_ □ ✕
Screenshot of the Thoughtful thoughts blog, teal Blogger theme
2010 – 2011

Thoughtful thoughts

When the hand-coding stopped, the writing moved to Blogger: essays on politics, integration, travel — in Turkish, English and German. Its name is no accident: the 1999 homepage had a section called thoughtful thoughts; eleven years later it became this blog.

Blogger atakee.blogspot.com tr · en · de

Rescued from Google's hands while still breathing — every image now lives here.

Read the plaque → Live original
@t@kee's - Mozilla Firefox_ □ ✕
Screenshot of the @t@kee's blog, gold Blogger theme
2008 – 2013

@t@kee's blog

The personal notebook of the blog years: naval-archive detective work, Turkcell rants, philosophical takes on institutions — six posts across five years, ending where blogging itself faded out.

Blogger tbb-wissenschaftsforum.blogspot.com

Lives at an address named after a forum that never came to be — never bothered to rename it.

Read the plaque → Live original

Lost & found · 2002

welcome to cinderella's homepage! - Microsoft Internet Explorer_ □ ✕
Screenshot of Cinderellas Fotoalbum, a pastel GeoCities page with an empty photo frame
~2001 – 2002

Cinderellas Fotoalbum

A found object: this page turned up in 2026 under the curator's own GeoCities account, and he has no memory of making it. A little German photo album built for someone, speaking in her voice — “this homepage was made by one of my many admirers :))” — with a link back to his homepage as Mein Favorit.

Yahoo! PageBuilder geocities.com/atakee de

Every photo is gone — the album page was never archived. A photo album with no photos, and an empty frame where Cindy used to be.

Read the plaque → Wayback original

The timeline · 1998 – 2026

  1. 1998Google is founded.
  2. 1999@t@kee's homepage opens on FortuneCity — rainbow letters, hit counter, guestbook.
  3. 2001The Wayback Machine opens to the public — quietly photographing everything below.
  4. 2001The Türkiye–EU site goes up at the Undersecretariat of Foreign Trade, easter egg included.
  5. 2004The Joint Parliamentary Committee site launches at the Grand National Assembly.
  6. 2008@t@kee's blog begins on Blogger, at an address named for a forum that never came to be.
  7. 2009GeoCities is shut down — the free-host era starts to end.
  8. 2010Thoughtful thoughts begins — the 1999 homepage section reborn as a blog.
  9. 2012FortuneCity goes dark; the 1999 homepage vanishes with it.
  10. 2013The last blog post. Blogging itself fades into social media.
  11. 2026The museum opens — the recovery is documented in the restoration lab — the guestbook reopens, and a links page opens onto the web outside these walls.

Curator's note — what you will encounter inside

These sites are deliberately left as they were built, imperfections included. Restoring them any further would mean destroying what they are: honest documents of how the web looked and worked twenty-some years ago. So, before you go in:

What was repaired, sparingly: the free hosts' injected ad scripts were removed, the text was transcoded to UTF-8 so Turkish renders on modern hosting, and the dead hit counter and news-headline widget were rebuilt to work again. Every intervention is documented, commit by commit, in the repository — the untouched originals live in its history, and the whole recovery is narrated in the restoration lab.