By: Jacob Bøtter
My history dabbling in the management and running of websites dates back to the turn of the century.
I had an S Club 7 fan site hosted on homepage.com. I was actually pretty proud of it. I had a wicked nav bar which changed colour as you rolled over the menu buttons (I stole the CSS off another site and tweaked it), a Bravenet hit counter, guestbook, photos, lyrics to every single song of theirs and MP3s for downloads.
Shit, copyright holders would have had a field day back in this wild west of content. I honestly don’t remember where I got all those image, music and video files that I linked to – presumably off various other S Club 7 sites without a thought to rights. That’s how things were.
I think I also had a Tripod site (simply because I recently got an email from Tripod – who knew they were still around?) and a Geocities page on which a friend and I posted parodies to songs that we made up during classes.
I occasionally blogged on Bebo, and in 2008 on a whim started up this WordPress blog here during downtime at my part time job. I picked WordPress because I liked the look of it better than Blogger (a good choice) and my username back before “musings” became passe, with my initial in front (twice for good measure. I have no love for e.e. cummings but I do think that’s an awesome moniker).
I’ve also got another two WP blogs – one I set up when T and I were flathunting in an effort to boost our chances, and one that’s not search-engine indexed that was meant to serve as my professional site, where I keep links to my best stories and such. Were I to get laid off, I’d whip that all into shape (possibly merging it with this blog to take advantage of its longevity).
But that’s not all. I’ve got a Posterous blog languishing, which was my first attempt at setting up a professional blog/website/portfolio, and lasted maybe two months.
And I’ve got my Tumblr, where I post photos from Project 365, reblog cool shit and share other snippets from life. I have to say, though, I’ve seen some awesome fully functioning websites built on Tumblr, and if I was starting from scratch today I’d be very tempted to make Tumblr my platform.
And slightly off topic, my writing itself dates back to the age of about 13-14, when I scored my first blogging gig (back before the word existing) writing an online “diary” for possibly the first women’s oriented online mag here. That, and all the other niche sites I went on to write for, have now gone through many incarnations and those words have been dispensed into the web’s graveyard, for which I am partially thankful.
My digital path is a bit of a wasteland. I should probably get around to cleaning up the litter of my abandoned footprints.
What does yours look like?
Awesome! When I was 15, I was a moderator for a big, all-girls forum and chat community. At the same time, I ran a terrible, silly, livejournal blog on which I rambled about my boring, 15 year old life and posted pictures of the things I wasted my money on.
Other than that, when I was 19 I started, and bombed (due to lack of internet knowledge.. and knowledge of websites in general) an online store, wasting thousands of dollars This discouraged my online ventures until a year and a half ago, when I decided to start blogging on WLGYL! Yours is much more interesting.
I also had a string of blogs, although my trail is not nearly as creative as yours. 🙂
I started blogging in college when my ex boyfriend moved away and I was stuck in a crappy internship. Then, I wrote about my travels as an exchange students, then I wrote a personal blog about getting over said ex boyfriend. Then, came a very short lived fashion blog, and a minimalism blog. Finally, I decided to start a personal finance blog to keep myself accountable 🙂
Mine sounds similar! I’ve been online for so long and in so many places I almost can’t remember where I’ve written things.
Pretty interesting history. Blogging was in its infancy in early 2000. So, you should be proud of your early accomplishments on the blogoshpere.
Wow, you have a long-lived online presence! Very appropriate, though, because you are now a journalist! I wouldn’t expect anything less.
I was just thinking about this this afternoon–I’ve been ‘writing’ since I was old enough to put pen to paper. I paper-journaled until ~2003, then tried livejournal to whine about a breakup. That was quickly abandoned when it became clear that I was not emo nor hipster enough to pull it off. In 2005, I was all myspace and blogged there a bit about daily life stuff, mostly trying to be funny. I joined facebook in 2004 when I got the invite because of my university affiliation (they used to be Uni-only, and extended invites in batches to various college alumni/current students), but didn’t do anything on it until 2007 or so, when myspace turned into a wasteland. Of course, in 2005-06, I was conquering my debt and spending WAY too much time at work looking at PF blogs. Eventually, it hit me that *I* could start one of my own to track my progress. I never EVER EVER thought anyone else would read it. EVER (I’m still surprised when I get comments!). It is completely out of character that I didn’t keep it private, but I guess I felt that making it public would make me hold myself accountable in some way. I am glad I did. 🙂 My blog is such a part of me now…and it makes my financial journey so much more fun than it would be if I were going this without it! Thanks for asking. 🙂
That is so awesome! LOL SSSSS club!! I loved watching them. Rachel (is that her name??) was so pretty.
You have a huge footprint- The only footprint I ever had was going on ICQ.
[…] I’ve been thinking about my various footprints online. Between my accounts on all the usual social networking suspects, plus the likes of Quora, […]
[…] Google, talked a bit about the early days of the internet industry. That took me right back to my early days of running a website, submitting it to Lycos, Altavista, and all the others for indexing – meta tagging, and other […]
Hi! First time visitor/commenter and I’m glad this is the first thing I read. Just the mention of Bravenet makes my heart flutter. LOL.
I remember the fan pages like it was yesterday! My friend once hosted a Moffats (HAHAHA) fan site because we were huge fans and hoped the site would bring them closer to us (le sigh).
I have been cleaning my online… clutter for the past few months. I have so much. Had I known that the internet would now be so public, I would’ve taken it easy back then!