matanza: a story

matanza was a word I came across in a book called Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words. I was looking for a name under which to rather optimistically publish a collection of poems when I was at college. Looking back, the poetic content was dire, bar perhaps one lucky ode. As the internet arrived I used the word as an online identity, which was and still is the norm.

The first website I set up was during 1995 when I worked as an IT Tech. at Bromley College in SE London. It was their first website, and it coincided with the release of Netscape 0.9. I moved jobs pretty quickly after that and had access to my own server and domain name at King's College London. matanza.cc.kcl.ac.uk was a focal point for information about the network expansion programme I was working on.

When I moved from there to Cable & Wireless in 1996 I took my website to matanza.demon.co.uk and the matanza website was born in earnest. Initially I went about creating my own sites that required manual updating but as scripting languages evolved and integrated with webservers, I moved to a content management approach and my own domains. The screenshots above are for reference and nostalgic purposes only. These sites are now long gone but some of the content may survive to this day.

The cow? The cow came from a magazine, sometime in 1995 advertising Joop for men. I liked the picture and scanned it. The image was the site mascot for a long time until 2000. The original page is now framed and still hangs in my study, I call her Lily.