10th Anniversary!

Well, would'ja believe Planet Mellotron's ten years old? OK, it hasn't had that domain name the whole time, but the site's been around that long in one form or another. Just for fun, I've uploaded an abbreviated version of an early 'albums' page, back when it was one long list, leaving A, B and the 'Non-'Tron' section I used to stick at the end, as it all gets a bit boring after a while, not to mention fatiguing to the eye. I can't find the floppy (!) that contains the original site (yes, all of it), written by my friend Andy Hyam (ex-ReGenesis), although it's probably around somewhere, so this is an amended version of the page from early 2002, bodged to look more like it did two years earlier.

Nice background colour, eh? And font? And super-tasteful visible tables... And why did I insist on repeating the artist name for multiple entries? Surely it'd be obvious if I only put it for the first one? And '[n.k.]'? 'Not known', or 'tracks not known', as it's now become. [Sigh] This is why I changed it to how it is now, boys'n'girls. And if you're wondering why, for example, only the first Anekdoten or Angel albums have links through to reviews (which I've fixed so they work on the current site), I seem to remember I couldn't see any point in linking to the same page from several adjacent entries, even though I, er, do now. The reviews used to be one page per letter, too... Oh, and the 'country' annotation was fairly new in '02, I think.

Probably the most startling thing about it (well, for me, anyway) is how little the actual albums page content has changed over the years. Entries come and sometimes go, but the bulk of the info here can still be found on the current site, still laid out in approximately the same way. Look on the bright side. I changed it. Who knows - one day I may look back on the current version in the same way I now do the original, so it may even change again at some point, although I can't really forsee a time when it'll be some all-singing-all-dancing whizzy thing full of animated crud, even though that seems to be the accepted way to make your site look 'modern' and 'relevant' these days. Content is king...

Anyway, as the appalling current vernacular has it: enjoy!