Inneresin’………..
I was (furtively) looking for a VERY old file… a legal document in fact, that I backed up onto CD, oh, I dunno, maybe 6 years ago? And when scouring the old skool CDs, I happened upon one of my very old bookmark.htm files, circa weblife, 1998 or so.
MAN. Was that really five years ago, 1998? MAN.
Sigh. Feeling old.
But anyway, I dogress (yes, I’m a dog). I scanned the bookmark file for what tickled my fancy as far as what was “bookmark worthy”. After all, my bookmarks today very business like, a reference tome, an are all but ignored – I tend to type in web addresses manually, by memory (although autocomplete in Moz and IE are a boon).
So besides all the porn links (which, btw, almost none work any longer), I happened upon a “Personal Sites I Like” subfolder. Ahhhhhh a trip down memory lane, and hey, let’s see what a bunch of folks I used to correspond with (and some I still do today) are up to…
Okay, there’s Flaunt, home of Shauna. Hrmm. Last update October 14 2002?!!?!!!!. And before that, only four updates dating back to February 2002? Not looking good.
Okay, how about Maggy, one of the most prolific oldskool bloggers there ever was… September 17, 2002?? WTF? And another site, Moments, hasn’t been updated since 2000? Why, that’s pre Dot.Com Bust!!! But hey, at least she keeps her old memories alive.
Okay. Maggy’s down for the count. But hey, there’s gotta be Lance… Lance Arthur – early pioneer in the whole ‘personal website can be cool, I wear my emotions on my sleeve for you to view’. Let’s go check it out.
Again, WTF? GlassDog is sporting the same interface from like 4 years ago. And it looks by the file date that front page hasn’t been changed in almost half a year? Lance used to make it an annual tradition, changing his website’s look.
Things are not looking good.
Okay… hold out hope. Here’s a good one. Drue Miller, author, one time magazine writer, web dev, early blogger before people knew what blogging was, she’s still updating, right? Wrong.
Sigh.
Next stop – Adam Rakunas. Nope, he’s gone too. But at least he’s off doing good things, raising money for a leukemia charity. And his Openwindow site is taken over by, yes, you guessed it, one of those evil “search engine” popup generators.
Okay. One guy won’t let me down. I see this bookmark right here… the Cocky Bastard site of John Halcyon Styn.
What the FUCK. John’s gone.
No wait, check that. He’s got a new gig over at Life Student. Pink, the hat, butt naked on a bike in the desert. Yep, that’s John! 🙂
How about Alex Massie… let’s see. Well, she knows PHP and has some cool stuff there. But I see nothing indicating “new stuff” as in “I’m writing here!”. But wait, didn’t she have that Anthology.net site? Oh oh. One of those “evil” search engine sites with all the popups. Not looking good, as I said above (see The WayBack Machine for how it used to look).
And wait. She also had that AfterDinner site. Looks like that is going strong! Maybe there’s hope yet.
Then there is Derek Powazek. Thank God Derek’s still holding out. Looks like the Fray is still going strong too. Way to go Derek! But wait. Looks like his “Kvetch” site is gone.
And there’s Michael Sippey. Sept 2002? Sigh.
Okay, at least I know Zannah is still updating stuff, because I visit still occasionally. But poor Found hasn’t been updated since April this year, and that was her longest standing site. She is much more current at Usr/bin/girl, and I see she has this site called Vox Machina that also gets lots of updates.
Manoman.
You know what this trip has done for me?
Well first…. mwuauahahahah (evil, maniacal laughter), I’m still here! I’m still posting! Damnit!
Wait, excuse that moment of insanity.
Actually, it makes me sad. There are folks listed above who have done some brilliant work online. Pioneers. There are others who were sorta along for the ride, but that’s cool too. There are many on that list who were “bloggers” long before blogging existed. There were some huge ideas there. Lance had an idea about starting up an Internet / Web version of the academy awards. Maggy was taking the world by storm with her journal thoughts (though at times, I just didn’t get it). Heck, Alexis was trying to become the forefront of a new type of media author – on top of AfterDinner, she had an audio “stories” site, if I recall correctly.
Damn. You can’t go home again…
But I’m still here! And here! Oh, and here!!! And this little place over here!
I just wish some of the folks listed above were still there 🙁
