say everything

I just finished reading Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. Say Everything is about the evolution of the internet and the blog format and is most interesting to me because as I read it I was able to trace the pattern of my own evolution in respect to the internet.

Say Everything gets interesting for me when it reaches 1995 in the internet history. I was in 5th grade at the time and as soon as we switched away from Prodigy and to unlimited dial up internet service at home I taught myself some HTML and started making websites. For me, creating and sharing my own content has always been my number one interest on the internet. I created an assortment of sites on Angelfire and Geocities. If I could remember my URLs, I’d look up my old sites on archive.org and share them with you but that part of my memory seems to have gotten corrupted; I can tell you though that my first site was an eyesore: black background with neon pink, yellow, and green text.

Sometime not too long before the summer of 1998, I became active on a forum at snuggles.net. (Does anyone else remember that? Google doesn’t even find anything about it.) It was a community of mostly teenage girls also interested in web design. ICQ was the popular instant messaging service at the time and a group of other snuggles.net members and I started having “late night chats” where we would all stay up all night and talk about a little bit of everything. When school started up again in the fall, none of us could stay up all night anymore and we moved our conversations to email. After school each day we’d all write diary like entries about what happened that day and email that to everyone in the group, we’d comment back on each other’s days via reply all. In the next couple years we moved to opendiary.com (unfortunately I can’t remember my user name there either).

In 2001, we moved to livejournal.com. I posted frequently on Live Journal from 2001 to 2004 and posted a few entries over the course of 2005. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, my Live Journal is still live and accessible. I read through my entries last week and am a little mind boggled, I don’t think any of them would make sense to anyone but me and, curiously, all the things I thought mattered so much then are things I haven’t even thought about in years.

As college ended in 2005 and having a real job began in 2006, I found less and less time for the internet. However, as I got ever more efficient at that job and the economy slowed so I had less work to do at that more efficient pace, I found myself looking for something to fill the free time at work and in February 2007 I started my first blog at blogger.com. For two years I wrote on and off and experimented with every aspect of blogging and in August 2009, I launched carrieactually.com (self hosted via wordpress.org) which is a compilation of everything I have learned about the internet over the course of the last 14 years.

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