Who Was D'Fire?
D'Fire was the online name used by my mom, Donna, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was self-taught in HTML, website design, graphics, GIFs, and the wonderfully chaotic art of building a personal homepage from scratch.
She created websites for family, friends, hobbies, and even our local fire department. She designed backgrounds, buttons, banners, animated graphics, awards, and page sets — all during a time when creating your own website meant opening an editor, typing HTML, uploading your files, and hoping everything worked.
She also became deeply involved in The Site Fights, an online website competition and community where people built elaborate personal websites, joined teams, exchanged graphics and gifts, signed guestbooks, cheered one another on, and formed friendships that often became very real relationships beyond the screen.
Mom became a member of the Soaring Eagles, served as Deputy, and eventually became Team Leader. To many people in that community, she was simply D'Fire.
What Is This Website?
This is an attempt to gather the scattered pieces of D'Fire's online life and give them a permanent home again.
More than two decades after many of those original websites disappeared, pieces of them still survive in unexpected places. Some remain in the Wayback Machine. Some survive on the archived pages of old friends and Site Fights teammates. Some exist as broken image links whose filenames still hint at what once lived there.
And some may still be waiting on old disks that Mom carefully backed up years ago.
I have been recovering archived pages, screenshots, graphics, writings, Site Fights history, Soaring Eagles pages, awards, Spiritbooks, old HTML, and fragments of websites she created for both herself and our family.
As those pieces are recovered, they will be preserved here in more than one form: original archived material whenever possible, screenshots showing how the page survived, and carefully restored or reconstructed versions that bring missing pieces back together.
Original
Files, graphics, HTML, and writings created by D'Fire and preserved exactly as they are found.
Recovered
Pages and artifacts rescued from the Wayback Machine and other surviving corners of the old web.
Restored
Carefully reconstructed pages using original material whenever possible so visitors can experience them again.
Why Preserve It?
The early personal web was incredibly temporary. Free website hosts disappeared. Image servers shut down. Guestbooks vanished. Hyperlinks broke. Computers failed. Passwords were forgotten. Entire communities that once felt enormous became difficult to find at all.
But the people and memories behind those pages were real.
For my family, these websites contain pieces of my mom's voice, creativity, humor, friendships, interests, and everyday life. They are not simply old webpages. They are family documents and little pieces of digital history.
This project exists so that those pieces do not quietly disappear again.
It is also a way to honor the people who shared that strange, wonderful era of the Internet with her — the friends who filled inboxes, signed Spiritbooks, exchanged gifts and graphics, cheered on their teammates, and became part of D'Fire's online family.
Which feels wonderfully appropriate. This archive is being built one recovered webpage, graphic, GIF, memory, and piece of HTML at a time. Check back as D'Fire's corner of the web slowly comes back to life.
Step Back Into D'Fire's Internet
Everything above belongs to the modern web. The button below does not. When the recreated archive is ready, clicking it will take you out of this modern site and into D'Fire's World Wide Web as it might have appeared more than twenty years ago.