As best as I can figure, I started blogging sometime in 1998. It wasn’t called blogging at the time; or at least it wasn’t called blogging in the circles that I frequented. Back in the days of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3, blogs took some effort and anonymity was all but certain. Before the days of WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and their ilk, teen-aged bloggers like myself spent as much time hand-coding HTML as they did writing thoughts. (To be fair, at least in my case, I probably spent more time on the HTML than I did the writing.) There were no themes to apply and customize; if you wanted your site to look a certain way, you had to figure out a way to make it happen using Notepad.exe and a lot of trial and error. An old version of Paint Shop Pro to aid in the creation of a logo was icing on the cake.
It doesn’t feel like it’s been a long time since I first started using WS_FTP to load pages to my free Tripod account, but now that it’s 2016 I realize it’s well over half a lifetime ago. What has changed since then? Have I improved my lot in life? Have I improved anyone else’s?
The Internet Archive WayBack Machine is an amazing, useful tool, but thanks to a combination of infrequent snapshots on its part and frequent breaks from blogging on my part, my earliest blog entries seemed to be lost to the abyss. It’s also possible that my earliest web stomping grounds are entirely forgotten to me, of course; I can remember two particular addresses – one, the aforementioned free Tripod account, and another, a directory on an internet acquaintance’s paid domain – but back in those days, teens closed and opened shop at different addresses on a regular basis. Reinvention was frequent.
My Tripod page, circa 2001. Some version of this appeared on roughly 100% of teens’ blogs at some point or another.
The earliest blog posts of mine from that acquaintance’s subdomain – those which are available via the WayBack Machine – reveal what were probably normal levels of attitude and misanthropy for a male of that age, in those circumstances. My life at the time wasn’t all that bad, but it wasn’t all that great, either. Looking back, it’s hard to say whether blogging was a good outlet or a good excuse to avoid “normal” human interaction. I think I’ve always been destined for introversion, but how would I have turned out if I’d had the internet of today instead?
Frequent posts – again, limited to the WayBack sampling – deal in details that I can’t imagine I’d have shared had I not been totally sure of my anonymity. In my blog’s prime I sometimes hit 100 unique visitors in a day, from all corners of the world, but I knew then (and verified with site statistics) that no one who knew me was remotely likely to come across my site. Provided such freedom, some might have called the resulting writing “raw” or “honest”, but hindsight suggests to me that I often just took the opportunity to be a bigger turd than I ever would have been had I been cognizant of other people’s circumstances. Put simply, my assessments of the world were such that I was always the hero or victim, and the world always the villain or abuser.
On an internet totally lacking in anonymity, what does one blog about? I’ve asked myself this question from time to time in the 15 years or so since I largely quit writing my thoughts online (or, heck, writing my thoughts at all). The biggest part of most of my days is work, and since I work for a corporation it’s a given that work as a blog topic is totally off limits. What else, then? As anonymity has gone down, accessibility of strangers’ thoughts on every topic under the sun has gone up. How many more Project Runway episode recaps can the internet handle? Does anybody really care about how I cook my salmon?
At the end of the day, maybe the most important thing is just to write. It’s sad, looking back, that so much of my life since 1998 is a mystery even to me. What was happening in my life 10 years ago today? What was I feeling? Here’s to the thought that in 10 years, at least, I’ll be able to answer those questions about today.
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