@t@kee's homepage
members.fortunecity.com/atakee1 · FrontPage Express 2.0
The story
This is where it all started: my first website, built in 1999 with FrontPage Express — the free editor that came bundled with Internet Explorer — and uploaded to a free plot of land on FortuneCity. Rainbow lettering on a black background, a picture gallery, a CV, pages about Turkey and travel, jokes, baklava, a guestbook, an ICQ number. Everything a personal homepage was supposed to have.
One corner of it was called thoughtful thoughts — a name that would resurface eleven years later as a blog, on the other side of this museum. The site was maintained until about 2004; FortuneCity itself went dark in 2012 and took the original with it. What you see here was recovered in 2026 from Wayback Machine captures taken between 2004 and 2012.
A pre-history, discovered during the museum's 2026 hunts: before FortuneCity, the same homepage lived at members.nbci.com/atakee — until NBCi shut its free hosting in July 2001 and that copy vanished, an eviction the curator had entirely forgotten.
The era
1999: the web arrives over a 56k modem onto an 800×600 CRT. Personal homepages live on free hosts — GeoCities, FortuneCity, Tripod — paid for with injected banner ads. Hit counters prove somebody visited, guestbooks let them say so, and your ICQ number is how they find you afterwards. Nobody has a smartphone; half the badges say “best viewed in Internet Explorer.”
What was restored
The free host's injected ad and tracking scripts were stripped (they're on
display in the restoration lab); the dead
hit counter and the news-headlines box were rebuilt to work again. Everything
else is untouched — including a photo that has pointed at
C:\My Documents\ since the day it was uploaded, and one picture
the archive never captured.
Sources
- Wayback Machine capture, 30 January 2004 — the recovery anchor
- Repository — every intervention documented commit by commit