We're putting grandma online again

Back in 2002, I was very proud to show my grandmother's website to my classmates whenever we had internet lessons. After she died in 2021, my sister organized the saving of her online presence by backing up her personal pages in an archive. Today is the day we put grandma online again!

Blogging in the 90's and the 00's

The website was called “Kénavo, Fouchtra, Tabarouette" and the original address was http://perso.wanadoo.fr/martine.bruhat. I was delighted to notice that it was part of a few webrings, and thus archived in the Wayback Machine (who can say that about their grandmother? this is so cool.)

Martine - also known as Tartine M when “surfing" on the web - bought a computer in the early nineties (I have photographic proof of huge computer cardboard boxes from 1993). I don't know if she had the occasion to use computers before buying one for herself. I know my grandparents also had a Minitel. Rumour has it that she almost got recruited at IBM in the early seventies, but decided to marry and become a school teacher in the Auvergne mountains instead... She probably did dabble with computers a little.

I have lots of memories of her on the computer. She taught me how to play MineSweeper and Lemmings probably around 1997 or 1998. She met lots of people online, through ICQ and The Palace, some who became friends and whom she visited in 1999 in Québec. In the 00's, she would always go to internet cafés when she was away from her computer. She was such a geek.

How was grandma's blog restored?

As I said, my sister organized the copy, I believe with our dad, apparently with something called HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2014] on October 16, 2021, before her accounts got closed or discontinued. I'm not sure when the website was last updated before that, but according to her own words, it might have been in 2004. The guestbook contains messages dated 2005.

All I did was unzipping the archive, setting up a github repo, and then I pushed everything to a gh-pages branch - not in this order at all. I also tried to clean the vintage HTML code a little, and to restore missing images and long-dead links. I've tried to replace them with accurate archives from the Wayback Machine whenever possible (it is still a work in progress because there are a looot of pages and I like doing it manually, except for Xiti links). Updating the mailto: was tough. I couldn't just remove it, so I turned it into a simple hover text.

I loved my grandmother very much, and I miss her more than words can describe. Her ashes are now at the bottom of the sea, a few miles behind the island that greets you on the first page of her website. I hope you'll like this retro tribute to Martine's whimsical contribution to the World Wide Web. And don't forget to close all the windows you opened!