A house that is rebuilt often keeps the marks of its doors. The record holds index.html, index_02.html, Nhome.html, Uhome.html, a news page and a news topics file: at least six entrances to the same house, each from a different year of its life.

What the piece presented

Every rebuild of an early homepage started at the door. A river town lot by lot elsewhere in the network maps a place the same patient way this door was rehung: one surface at a time, each version kept where a visitor might still find it. The duplicate entrance files are not clutter; they are the record of redesigns, each front page left standing when the next was built.

What the record kept

The captures preserve the entrance files across the whole life of the domain, which makes the front door the best-dated object in the house: you can watch it change in 2002, 2004, 2007 and after. The news pages kept the door's announcements, the small bulletin of what had been added to the rooms.

What the door was for

On a hand-built site the front page was the room that was never finished. It announced the seasons, carried the newest drawing, and pointed into the rooms. Keeping old doors reachable was partly courtesy and partly pride: any entrance that had ever been painted stayed standing.

Doors as a changelog

Read in sequence, the entrance files are the site's changelog. index is the standing door; index_02 marks a rebuild; Nhome and Uhome mark alternate entrances for different visitors or different seasons; the news pages are the door's bulletin. Nothing was thrown away when a door was rehung, so the house accumulated entrances the way old houses accumulate doorbells.

For the archive this abundance is luck: the front door is the most-captured object in the domain, which makes it the most precisely dated.

The door as the most-captured room

Every capture of the site began at a door, which makes the entrances the densest part of the record. A month-file might be photographed twice; a door was photographed every visit. The consequence is that the house's face is known better than any of its rooms, and the redesigns, the redrawn titles, the shifting announcements, are the best-dated changes in the whole archive.

The door was also the only room every visitor saw, which made it the one surface the keeper could not leave alone.

Six entrances, one house

The abundance of entrances is the record's own doing as much as the keeper's: captures preserved whichever door was standing, and several stood at once. index_02 beside index, Nhome beside Uhome, a visitor in 2004 could plausibly arrive through a door built for 2002 and never notice.

That redundancy is what a hand-built house looked like: doors were not replaced, they were succeeded, and the old ones stayed standing.

The news pages complete the door's equipment. A small news.html and news_topic.html kept the announcements that did not belong to any room: a new shelf, a rebuilt wall, a guest book reopened. The door announced; the rooms held. That division of labor is the whole architecture of a kept house, compressed into a handful of files.

What is not shown

Which entrance the keeper considered canonical at each moment, or how many visitors came through each. The record keeps the doors; the foot traffic is gone with the counters.