{"id":33038,"date":"2021-11-27T22:02:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T22:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=33038"},"modified":"2021-11-27T22:02:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T22:02:00","slug":"my-first-website-or-one-of-them-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2021\/11\/27\/my-first-website-or-one-of-them-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"My first website — or one of them, anyway"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was looking through some files I had stashed in a backup folder on an old hard drive, and I came across an almost complete reproduction of one of my first websites, which I hand-coded in an HTML editor around 2003 or so. It was called “A Complete Waste of Time,”<\/a> and most of what it contained was links to weird Internet sites and pages that I collected at the time (and still do, in case you come across any). But it also had indexes of useful pages as well, including a lot of media-related links<\/a>, and a lot of financial links<\/a> — stock-quote sites, etc. — because at the time I was the business columnist for the website of the Globe and Mail<\/em>, a daily national newspaper based in Toronto. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first “live” version of the Globe<\/em>‘s website had just launched in 2000<\/a>, and I was one of a team of about seven or eight people who worked for it, in a separate area on the third floor. This was around the time I discovered “blogs,” and started my own, which would gradually evolve into the site you’re on now. At the time, the Globe <\/em>had put all of its columnists behind a paywall, which cut my readership by about 90 percent, but at some point it dawned on me that a blog could be like a column — but with more interactivity — and it wasn’t behind a paywall! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thus began my career as a “blogger,” which ultimately led to a job doing social media for the Globe<\/em> (imagine explaining to a senior executive that people should be “tweeting”), and then a job at my friend Om Malik’s site GigaOM, a technology blog network based in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the site ran out of money and shut down rather suddenly in 2015 (someone bought the domain name and kept running a kind of zombie version<\/a>), and then I joined Fortune <\/em>magazine, and finally joined the Columbia Journalism Review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, this is the version of my site<\/a> from 2003, which I’ve recreated more or less accurately (the original was only 600 pixels wide, since not a lot of graphics cards or monitors could display anything wider, so I widened it a bit). This was actually an upgrade from my first site, which I called “World Wide Weirdness.” As far as I can recall, I created that one in the mid-1990s, but I can’t find any record of it. It was very much like the one I’ve linked to here, but more of a hodge-podge of links to weird things and odd news items. In the intro, I wrote: “Here’s a picture of me at work,” but it was actually a screenshot taken from the game DOOM. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Save<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The consumer web was still relatively young in 2003, but it was old enough that I included a bunch of humorous elements at the bottom making fun of various web and blog standards — including badges making fun of the awards and other ephemera that some sites displayed (“Top 10 Sites on the Web” etc.) and a counter that just rotates randomly, poking fun at sites that actually kept track of the thousands who had visited them. Later versions included links to a “web-ring,” which was a way of linking to other blogs you liked, and links to sites like Del.icio.us, which I used to keep track of interesting things (I use Instapaper now for much the same thing).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the fascinating things about putting my old site back together is seeing how many of the links are still around — most of them have disappeared, not surprisingly, due to “link rot” and other phenomena, and I haven’t really tried to update them. But some of the weirder sites remain, which is hilarious to me. I mean, it’s not a surprise that Bert Is Evil<\/a> or Hillbilly Hercules<\/a> no longer exist, but I definitely didn’t expect the Church of the Blind Chihuahua to still be around. And yet, there it is<\/a> (the blind dog is a metaphor, in case you were wondering). The Smoking Gun is still around too, although it’s not as relevant as it used to be<\/a>, since everyone just posts dirt about celebrities etc. to Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have corrected some of the links — including one of the first weird sites I ran across in my earliest days on the web, Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches<\/a>, which was created in 1994 by a university student named Patrick Michaud and built around testing a single premise: namely, that “toasters which fail to eject Pop Tarts cause the Pop Tarts to emit flames 10-18 inches in height.” Based on the video evidence, this appears to be accurate. Another was a site that contained video of the indescribable moment when<\/a> a bunch of engineers decided to blow up a whale carcass using half a ton of dynamite. I remember showing people in the Globe newsroom this video in 1994, because at that time I was one of the few reporters with Internet access at their desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, the site is like a time capsule — a glimpse of a simpler time on the Internet, before the invention of social media and the dominance of trillion-dollar platforms like Google and Facebook, and the disinformation maelstrom we’ve lived in for the past several years. I often wish we could go back to the days of link-blogs, when all I cared about was trolling through the web looking for interesting sites like Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches. Are we better off now? I honestly don’t know. Things have definitely gotten more complicated! But here we are.<\/p>\n

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I was looking through some files I had stashed in a backup folder on an old hard drive, and I came across an almost complete reproduction of one of my first websites, which I hand-coded in an HTML editor around 2003 or so. It was called “A Complete Waste of Time,” and most of what … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “My first website — or one of them, anyway”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}