{"id":26184,"date":"2021-08-05T08:05:52","date_gmt":"2021-08-05T12:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=26184"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:43","slug":"those-were-the-web-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/08\/those-were-the-web-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Were The (Web) Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago, back when the internet was in its wide-eyed childhood, before Google, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest scrubbed and scoured the humanity out of the web and turned it into a trillion-dollar digital strip mine, I had a homepage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You may not remember that, in the late nineties, many tech startups imagined that their road to internet riches lay in enticing ordinary people to create shrines to themselves on the web.\u00a0 Sites like Angelfire, GeoCities, Go.Com and Tripod offered free homepages for that purpose.\u00a0 Naturally, I took the dive.\u00a0 The thought of having one’s own address on the WORLD WIDE WEB<\/em> (!) was irresistible to anyone with an outsized sense of identity and correspondingly few friends.<\/p>\n

I thought that my homepage (and those of others) might be a way to make connections, maybe even friendships, with like-minded people without geographic limitations.\u00a0 One of the popular ways to interact in the homepage era was via a site’s guestbook<\/em>.\u00a0 People who visited your website might leave a comment in your guestbook, just to let you know they were there.\u00a0 The remarks were friendly, never snarky, as that would not only be rude but would be sure to deprive oneself of a nice comment in return.<\/p>\n

I happened to stumble upon my old guestbook while searching the Wayback Machine for fragments of my tbns.net homepage, CHCollins on the Web.<\/em>\u00a0 I decided to share it (below) as a reminder of how life used to be, not only on the web but in the real world.\u00a0 I’d prefer that you view its length not as an indulgence but as an illustration of how charitable and generous folks could be.<\/p>\n

The first line of each entry lists the visitor’s screen name<\/em>, their website (if they had one) and the date of their visit.\u00a0 Some of these screen names are so poignantly 1990s.\u00a0 I never knew the real identities of many of them, i.e., those I played hearts with on Yahoo Games.\u00a0 The visitors who used real names were either the folks that I “met” on photo-sharing sites (PhotoCritique, ShutterCity) or other homepagers who were in the same “web ring<\/a>” as me.<\/p>\n

Three of the comments in this guestbook archive happen to be from current subscribers!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>GUESTBOOK (1999-2001)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n