I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
And it really was both new and cool to use a 1-frame-a-minute webcam to spy on a coffee machine on another continent or click a Big Red Button That Does Nothing.
Back then, we didn’t have platforms or feeds or social networks or… blogs.
We had homepages.
There were no databases to configure. No scripts to install. No plugins, no security patches. There were no cookies. No iframes, no web-first scripting languages, no web apps.
A well-organized homepage was a sign of personal and professional pride
Dates didn’t matter all that much. Content lasted longer; there was less of it. Older content remained in view, too, because the dominant metaphor was table of contents rather than diary entry.
That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblog came a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)
Each would-be Netizen had to bushwhack their own path.
You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)
Not everyone had the desire to publish their angsty poetry, sexcapades, or surfing habits on a daily basis; the other limiter on chrono-content was the sheer time and energy it required. Diarying was a helluva lot of work.
Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.
Suddenly, instead of building their own system, they were working inside one.
