Blogs are a funny thing. Back when then internet was new, the people who were on the internet were students and academics. Every university had 1 server and every student had 1 account and we would use our account on what was at the time a massive unix server to send emails to one another, browse usenet posts and look for pornography.
Then the computer science community found that you could have a file that would be served up to people over something called the World Wide Web. These files could be linked to each other using underlined hyperlinks. We discovered embedded images and image maps where clicking on parts of an image would link you to a different place. We discovered animated images, images that cycled between several frames. GIFs we called them.
Every CS student started working on their home page. Writing up the projects they were working on. And every homepage had a page counter. A page counter is an image that isn’t really an image. It was a program that read a file, got a number from that file, added 1 to that number, wrote the file back, then linked to several images of digits that corresponded to that number. So dynamic pages were born.
Well what if this file wasn’t just a number? What if we recorded some message that the reader had left behind? Thus the internet guestbook was created. Home pages could not only track how many visitors they had, visitors could leave the owner a message. The messages they left behind could be read by other visitors. Sorta like the comment section of a newsfeed.
Then someone got the bright idea of turning the guestbook inside out. Instead of publishing comments from visitors, what if it published the actual site? The inside out guestbook became a web log, shortened to BLOG. By then homepages were not just the domain of CS students. Geocities showed up and offered homepages to everyone.
You get a small space to host your homepage but writing a page in HTML and uploading to the space via FTP was tedious. People wanted to an easy way to post content, so blogging on a Content Management System was created.
I did the page counter thing, the guestbook thing, blogging on blogspot and hosting a wordpress site on a linux host as did many other people. It was all just for fun. If we had an idea how to monetize it, we’d be billionaires. I still can’t figure out how hosting content for free can make you billions.
But here I am trying again. Just for fun.
