Today marks my 6 year blogging anniversary. I usually don’t mention those kind of birthdays much, but what the heck … lets be nostalgic for once.
My first blog was hosted at Radio Userland and, against all odds, is still somehow online. Userland used to be true pioneers, but it looks like they forgot to innovate. I still believe they have a strong offering. Compared to pretty much all other blogging packages, they have a real content-centric approach, which makes it very different. But compared to WordPress, there really is no community to speak of.
Afterwards I did a short stint on my selfhosted Blojsom blog, until I found my true calling, right here, on Streamhead.
And before blogging, I have had a web pressence for as long as I can remember. Sadly, the traces of that are almost gone. The Internet Archive has a few, but looking at the first page, it’s clear that I used to already have some sort of site in 1996. The university I was at back then renamed their servers and I really can’t remember what it used to be called before. Most of my early sites were very graphic intensive (no dialup for me, I was on a university network), so you won’t get much value from the Internet Archive.
photo credit: Liqueur Felix
1996 seems both distant and close. It’s weird. It was the time when I discovered the Internet (and in particular, the World Wide Web). I can’t remember clearly, but I believe Internet only got really big in about 1998. So the first few years were strange. There still were other things than the WWW, like newsgroups, IRC and telnet MUDs. But one by one we saw all of them disappear. In 1996, there was no Google, it’s very hard to believe, but it was all about Yahoo!, Hotbot and Altavista. Strange and wonderful times.
Even before that, I was online, I had a little BBS called “Virtual Hell” (yes, really). Very few traces remain of that. I’m really going to have to look through my CD backups one day. Maybe in a few years.