dear isobel

I’ve been online since 1997. I started with AOL and I’m ashamed to say that I kept AOL until 2005. I know, I know, I was one one of the last in my group of online friends to switch over to Firefox. (After using Firefox for about a week, I couldn’t imagine going back to IE.)

I don’t want write a boring internet history page so I’m going to try something a little different. I’ll divide into a top ten list thing and see how that goes.

1. Yahoo Is Good At Ruining Things
Case 1: When I first started with free hosts, I was at GeoCities for awhile. Not Geocities in its current form, but in the beginning when it was divided into neighborhoods based on the topic and then neighborhoods were divided even further until you were  down to address blocks. It inspired a wonderful sense of community. There were webrings and cliques devoted to specific neighborhoods and you could meet people just by surfing other sites in your area. It was so much fun.

Yahoo bought Geocities around ‘98 or ‘99 and gradually did away with that system. Replacing addresses like http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palladium/2136/ with http://www.geocities/username

So much less fun and original.

Case 2: I used to use a mailing list service called Onelist. I was a member of several writing groups, a couple of soap opera lists, some Roswell ones, a few social. It was a fabulous. It was bought out by Egroups at one point and relatively little changed except the email address to send messages to.

Then Yahoo came along and rules were changed, the entire look changed, the look of the archives changed, a lot of mailing lists were lost in the transition and it was just so much less fun.

Yahoo = Death.

2. There Used To Be A Lot of Free Hosts
There may very well be some free hosts left out there but when I started out, people did not own their own domains. They weren’t necessarily expensive but the hosting packages usually were. I was on free servers from the time I started in ‘97 until my girl Ally hooked me up at beyond-imagining where I was happily hosted from 2001-2003. She was fabulous and let me have free reign

But I started at expages. With a Hanson fan site. Yes, a very dark period in my life. I also used the AOL publisher (not for much, but my Roswell fanfiction was there for about six months). I also used Crosswinds, Envy.nu (what a pretty name though), Tripod, Geocities, FortunePages, Angelfire and I’m sure there’s at least three or four others I’m forgetting.

Free hosts used to be the way of the land. Now I think everyone who’s anyone (and people aren’t anyone and never will be) have their own domains or are hosted. I remember being excited just to be offered like 25 megs. Now I’m at Dreamhost with like 100 gigs. My how time flies

3. I Remember ‘Zines
For about a year — 2001-02 — I was involved in that massive fad of online magazines that were sent through email. Members were usually AOL and the ‘zines were formatted with AOL 3.0 (4.0 ruined everything stylistically *sniffles*). There were entertainment ‘zines, there were writing ‘zines, there were gossip ‘zines, there were “real life” ‘zines…the list goes on and on. Some of my favorites were the daily quotes or my absolute favorite in my teenybopper days — Backstreet Backpack. I was on AOL dial up so it took like 45 minutes to load it. It usually had like one picture, some news and other tidbits. I actually ran a few of my own ‘zines, though they were not at all popular and generally sucked. God, there were actually ‘zines about owning ‘zines and ads for joining ‘zines in other ‘zines.

Good times.

Okay, so I can’t think of ten right now. I’ll be back.