Basenotes is celebrating its 21st Birthday (well, it was last week, but we was offline!)

To celebrate, we’ve had a little bit of a facelift! Have a look around and see what’s new!

This is Version 10 of Basenotes.

Like The Doctor, Basenotes sometimes regenerates. Each one may look different, but it’s still the same old Basenotes underneath! Let’s travel back in time and see the online equivalent of our baby photos!

Basenotes Version 1

21 years is a long time! When I first made Basenotes, there was no Facebook or Netflix. Each page was coded by hand and uploaded one by one to a server.

This screenshot is from a few months after I had launched the site, though it looks pretty similar to how it looked at launch. When the site launched I just concentrated on men’s fragrances, as that’s what I mainly knew about.

The forums were run on a perl script called Matt’s WWWBoard, and as you can see , it was pretty basic!

At the time, all of the fragrance directory was held in a database on my Bondi-Blue iMac, called Claris Works. The pages for the directory were created by essentially copying and pasting the data on to a webpage. If someone sent in a review (you had to send them in by email in the beginning), I would also copy and paste that on to the page.

The notes pyramid was also an image, that I would have to create for each fragrance. Mainly as I wanted to have the triangle behind the notes, and I didn’t know how to do that without making the whole thing an image. (Keep an eye on this Burberry Touch page, we’ll be showing how it changed throughout the years.)

Shortly after we launched, the crappy forum script we were using became a little unwieldy. All of the discussion was moved to a website called eGroups. EGroups was a mailing list, so as well as being able to post on the eGroups website, you could also email messages in.