D'Fire's World Wide Web of Yesteryear

D'Fire was the online name used by my mom, Donna, during the early 2000s. She was self-taught in HTML, website design, graphics, GIFs, and the wonderfully chaotic art of building a personal homepage from scratch.

She created websites for family, friends, hobbies, and even our local fire department. She designed backgrounds, buttons, banners, animated graphics, awards, and page sets. This was all during a time when creating your own website meant opening an editor, typing HTML, uploading your files, and hoping everything worked.

She also became deeply involved in The Site Fights, an online website competition and community where people built elaborate personal websites, joined teams, exchanged graphics and gifts, signed guestbooks, cheered one another on, and formed friendships that often became very real relationships beyond the screen.

Mom became a member of the Soaring Eagles, served as Deputy, and eventually became Team Leader. To many people in that community, she was simply D'Fire.

More than two decades after these websites were created, an incredible amount of Mom's work still survives. What began as a search through the Wayback Machine and forgotten corners of the old web led to something we never expected: backup copies of her websites preserved on her old external hard drive.

Those backups contain original HTML, graphics, backgrounds, GIFs, music, writings, family websites, and other files she created and saved herself. In many cases, entire pages survived together with the files that originally made them work.

The Wayback Machine and other surviving pieces of the old web helped us rediscover this part of Mom's life and continue to help us research its history. But whenever her own original files survive, those files are the foundation of the restoration you will find here.

As each page is restored, the goal is not to redesign or modernize it. It is to preserve what Mom actually built. Her original HTML, graphics, wording, music, and wonderfully early-2000s design choices are being kept whenever possible, with only the changes necessary to make things work on today's web.

The early personal web was incredibly temporary. Free website hosts disappeared. Image servers shut down. Guestbooks vanished. Hyperlinks broke. Computers failed. Passwords were forgotten. Entire communities that once felt enormous became difficult to find at all.

But the people and memories behind those pages were real.

For my family, these websites contain pieces of my mom's voice, creativity, humor, friendships, interests, and everyday life. They are not simply old webpages. They are family documents and little pieces of digital history.

This project exists so that those pieces do not quietly disappear again.

It is also a way to honor the people who shared that strange, wonderful era of the Internet with her. The friends who filled inboxes, signed Spiritbooks, exchanged gifts and graphics, cheered on their teammates, and became part of D'Fire's online family.