One of the oldest and most trusted web resources on the internet today, shintara started life way back in 1997 under the guise of geocities.com/shintara, shintara.tripod.com and finally on 1st November 2001; shintara.net.
Below is an account of historical events outlining "shinstory" in the making.
Back then the web was like a virgin, soft and sweet to touch with its innocense prevailing, its unmolested lips were free from keyboard warriors, religous radicals and sperm doners who shoot blanks.
It was a time when Mac OS X was known as just that, and a powerful machine that had 1Gb of RAM was a big deal!
Shit was seriously bright way back when! You could get away with an orange and baby shit grey coloured website.
Before shintara was known as shintara it went by the name of kokane's site (my handle on irc at the time), the oldest screenshot I have dates back to 3rd July 2000 when Windows 98 was still a thing!
Then there were the trials and tribulations of ensuring your website rendered the same in all browsers, Netscape being the most challenging! The modern day web developer just wouldn't understand 
An old screenshot testing Netscape below.
The final version of shintara on the free webhosting platform tripod, the link still works (shintara.tripod.com) with redirect still in place! Kudos to the tripod hosting platform.
Virtual Machines were unheard of which meant hosting your own services at your primary residence was chaotic to say the least! Check out the setup below;
A serious OH&S issue on the far right with that monitor perilously placed above the server farm consisting of powerful pentium 2 machines bursting with intel inside! Each machine labelled with IP address and purposed specifically as DNS, http and IRC running FreeBSD or Slackware Linux.
Next to the server farm was the legendary firewall, a FreeBSD driven 486 providing an internal gateway and protection from the www of bad guys. On the floor to the bottom center of the pic is the UPS, this was an overkill of 2kVA providing a genuine three hours of uptime to the server farm in case of a power outage.
A few more photos of the CRT madness!
shintara.net was hosted amongst this.
Stay tuned for some more shinstory in the next update iteration.
Last updated: 2025-08-24 13:40:32