A brief history of tony|contosta.com on the web
Well, I've done many, many web sites in the past eight years. It's pretty crazy that I went to The Ohio State University in Autumn 1998 pretty much knowing that I wanted to be in computers. I designed my first site in the summer of 1998. It wasn't much at all. Just a background image and some cheesy text. Oh, and it was the most non-standards compliant site that I have ever made. Fair enough, I guess, considering that most of the sites out there today are just as bad as my first site was.
I used to run my web server off of my road runner dynamic IP address. I ran a 486/66 firewall/router that I used to connect all of my apartment's PCs to the web. At first, I didn't register a domain name. I considered it too much work. Whenever I wanted to share my site with somebody, I would just IM them my IP address. A simple copy and paste and, BAM, they were at my site. Copy. Paste. Click. I could do this pretty consistently because my IP address rarely changed if I left my firewall on. However, in March 2002 I made my NCAA site completely online, so everybody would need a site to go to and a login. Well, rather than risk my IP address changing in the middle of the tournament, I finally registered contosta.net. I also was graduating from OSU, and I needed a site to post my resumé and some projects.
Choosing contosta.net was a quick fix for this site, mostly because it was similar to contosta.com, the site I wanted but could not have. I used some DNS-To-Go software to update DNS servers whenever my road runner IP changed. This setup worked well for me, and I built my first multi-page site personal site. I'll try to find some old files and put together a screenshot.
Well, I joined Reflex DT in April 2003, and I was thrown into a design world. All of a sudden, contosta.net sounded so old-school. I wanted something that would be original and catchy. Being the programmer that I am, my creativeness lacks when it comes to brainstorming website names. The best I could come up with is ExtremeGoodness. You know, goodness and whatnot. But to the EXTREME. Oh, yeah. It was cool. Trouble was that I couldn't design a site that would live up to the "coolness" of ExtremeGoodness. Maybe I should have registered SortaGoodness.com.
So, after a year of putzing around with ExtremeGoodness, I temporarily retired the idea, and registered tonycontosta.com, and here we are today.