Readers of this site may have noticed that at the bottom of the front page lies an inscription proudly blaring the alleged date this digital demesne was first set up:

Established on the 14^th day of August, 2017 CE
and the 6^th day waning of Metageitnion, χϟθ.α AKO

Given that i’m writing a post called “When was this website established?”, you’ve probably worked out that that’s not completely right. It’s a date that could qualify for the founding of this site, but it’s by no means the only one.

The 14^th of August, 2017, was the day that i created the account “batavia” (later changed to “marijnflorence” to avoid some unfortunate international associations) on the free web host Neocities, the original — sort of, we’ll get there — host of this website. I picked this date for display because it was a nice, clear starting point, emblazoned on the sidebar of my Neocities profile. But for the first few years of that account’s existence, nothing much happened.

The start of satyrs.eu as it currently exists can be traced to the 22^nd of March, 2018, when i created a repository on code-sharing site Github with the intent to much around and maybe make a proper personal site. This was transferred to Neocities at some point — i assume about two days later, although i can’t be sure, since Neocities’ dating on old posts is hopelessly vague.

There are two more dates in the running to be the true date of establishment. You see, “batavia” was not my first Neocities site. Far from it, my first attempt at a website was “xoticmatter”, created on the 26^th of April, 2017, four months before the August date! I never got around to making much content for it, and at some point i lost the password, leading me to create a new account.

The final date in contention is specifically about the founding of satyrs.eu. The site used to be hosted on a subdomain of neocities.org, but on the 8^th of January, 2021, i finally coughed up the dosh for a domain name.

Which one of these dates is the “real” date of establishment? One could make a compelling case for any of them, but i’ll be sticking with the current 14^th of August, as a nice compromise between the earlier “xoticmatter” position and the later Github and domain name positions.