Postcards From Across the Pond

I didn’t mean to do this, honest. It’s the fault of the lame WordPress Archives Widget. It’s there on the right, at the bottom of the sidebar under What’s New. Look at it! It’s a piece of crap. And I knew I could do better, and that’s what started it all.

My intent was simply to gather my Postcard posts into a single archive (which is now available if you click ARCHIVES at the top of this page), but once I crawled into the rabbit hole, there was no way out except to keep digging. What I got out of it was a companion piece, about the nuts and bolts (and wires) of the early Internet, which I posted on my other blog, The Patriarch Diaries, and the realization that the piece I did about the longevity of this blog — Happy Anniversary to Me — only scratched the surface. Prior to Postcards, this was a blog about Irish Step Dancing, and prior to that, it was an on-line journal (a web-log, as we called them in those days), and although the early posts of the Cracks of Time journal date only to September 1998, I already had a Hiking Blog up and running by then, which had started in May of 1997. And that got me thinking, and doing a bit of research.

Quick Aside: these were not my only blogs; I had a variety of them, overlapping and colliding with each other, during those early days: blogs about my SCUBA diving, Genealogy research, cigar smoking, Bag Piping, etc. There were also other journals—The Soap Box, Suburban Hell, and Postcards from Hell—as well as a monthly web magazine (humorous, of course, in the tradition of The Onion) called The Dumpster. These, however, came and went and do not add any credibility to my blog’s longevity.

The only other personal web-journal on the Internet that competes with mine in the longevity department is Justin Hall’s Links.net, which he started in January 1994. Many other web journals sprang up between that date and my earliest, continuous posting (my first, actual post was on the 26th of March 1996, but that was just a one-off), but those authors have all found better (and, one must hope, more lucrative) uses for their time since then. That, as far as I am able to tell, leaves only me and Justin, and as Justin hasn’t posted in over a year and half so, in my view, the title is now mine.

In addition to establishing longevity, compiling my old blog posts for the Archives enabled me to see them as important records, not so much for what they say (they are mostly just the ramblings of a self-obsessed geek), but as a look into how the Internet developed.

The depth of personal revelation in those Cracks of Time posts (we on-line journalers originated over-sharing) may shock the people of today, but you need to understand the nature of the Internet at that time, and what it offered. I was not alone—not by any means—but I was a member of an elite group. To have a successful web log, back in the day, you needed a raft of skill-sets. Aside from just wanting to do it, and being willing to bare yourself to the world, you needed to be able—financially and technically—to obtain Internet real estate, code in HTML, and understand how to port your pages up to your Internet treehouse. (Having discovered—after crafting my first webpage and acquiring a web directory to put it in—that I had no clue how to upload it, I called tech support and was told, in a nakedly condescending tone, “You get an FTP tool and FTP it up!”) I worked it out eventually.

In addition to all that, there was the final hurdle, one which many fell at: you needed to be able to write, to string words together in a manner that was pleasing and entertaining. Many a technologically gifted geek fell at this hurdle, and many good writers failed to climb the learning curve necessary to get their gems out into the wider world.

But for those of us who did, it was a brave, new world. And somehow, organically, we found each other. Not just journalers, but Rock Climbers, Wine Aficionados, Camera Buffs, Train Fanatics—they all managed to group together into close-knit communities, separated in the real world by counties and continents. It was truly amazing.

A quick example: when we began smoking cigars, we tapped into the cigar aficionado newsgroup (Alt.Smokers.Cigars, or ASC as we called it). Within ASC, groups of people who lived near each other began meeting up in real life, forming real-life friendships. They then formed chapters, that met in the real world, and began inviting other, real-world chapters to visit them, and this sub-community of disparate people formed deep friendships and shared many experiences. It was a magic time, and I feel fortunate to have been part of it.

That, however, involved cigars. But to put something as deeply personal and introspective as a personal journal on the web? What, are you crazy? Not really.

With the Web as it was back then, organically forming into homogenous clusters, any non-journaler who accidentally ran across an on-line journal would just move on (after mining it for salacious tidbits). But to a journaler, it would not be voyeurism, it would be a chance to share with like-minded people. If we found a journal that was really good, we would tell our other journaling web-friends. And our community would grow. For us, it was a chance to break out of our solitude and share ourselves—under a thin veil of anonymity—with others like ourselves. We were a secret society, sneaking off into the forest to sit around a campfire and tell stories to each other, stories that had waited long for an understanding ear. And that was something really special.

Back then, the Web was a wild place. We were pioneers, hacking our way into the wilderness, creating our own settlements, seeking out others to help us build a village. We were all of one mind, and we were all a bit idealistic.

“The Internet will always be free,” we proclaimed, “there will never be any advertising.”

I’ll let you marvel at that for a while.

As you know, in a very short time, the paths we hacked out turned into dirt tracks, which were then paved and widened, and then made obsolete by a superhighway that swept through, overturning everything. Soon, mini-malls and gas stations and billboards and bars and strip clubs and drug dens proliferated. And all of them demanded money.

But that was the future, and we couldn’t see that. All we knew was the present, which was idyllic, and anonymous. So anonymous, that I didn’t even bother to use aliases to hide who I was or who I was talking about. In the wild and largely empty World Wide Web, the odds of someone I knew stumbling on my web-Journal were infinitesimally small. (And, actually, I was right: those entries in the early pages of the Archive, where my girlfriend had ‘found’ my on-line journal; it turns out she didn’t stumble across it accidentally, she hacked into my secure file folders on my computer and read it there.) Even so, after only a few entries I switched to aliases and, by the time the journal morphed into Postcards From Across the Pond, I had adopted the habit of not using names at all—I simply referred to people using labels, a literary device I continue to employ. (The only changes made to the revived archive posts involved applying that device to anyone named within them.)

In some of the entries, you’ll encounter the term Ring, or Web-Ring. This was an early method of connecting websites. If you joined the Irish Dance Webring, you put some code in your pages and people visiting your Irish Dance site could click the navigation buttons and find other Irish Dance sites. Also, the habit of listing other websites in a sidebar became spontaneously popular, and in these ways the web grew, and people could more easily find things they were interested in. Along with that, search engines proliferated: WebCrawler, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and, of course, Google. And very soon, in August 1999, Blogger was born.

We HTML coders turned up our noses at it, but it just grew and grew and, by 2006, I found I needed to join Blogger simply so I could comment on other “blogs” as they were now calling them. It wasn’t until 2008 that I finally abandoned HTML and put my weblog on Blogger. The changes from when I first began in May 1997 to that date were staggering. Since that time, however, not so much. I’m still on a blogging platform, only now it’s WordPress, and the process is still pretty much the same. There is more pressure to monetize blogs these days (why are you writing a blog if not to make money?) but otherwise the physical acts of writing, editing, and uploading haven’t changed a great deal.

What has changed is the Internet, and not always to our detriment. Us older folks love to bash the Internet, but the fact is, I spend the bulk of my day on it. We marvelled at the way it was back then but could not conceive of how it would morph in the future. There were some bumps along the way (remember Pop-Up ads and Mousetraps?) but it has become, over a span of about twenty years, an indispensable source of entertainment, information and communication.

It saves me uncounted hours by providing access to music in all its forms—video, audio, score sheets, lyrics, guitar chords, background information, and more. As a writer, I look up things constantly, source research materials, and write, edit and proof my manuscripts using on-line tools (or, at least, tools I got on-line). And, when my manuscript is complete, I can publish it at the touch of a button (although many people would not count this as a good thing).

Others, with more varied interests than mine, can stream TV and movies, produce podcasts, download their favourite songs, take photos or videos and transform them into entertaining content for others to enjoy. And lately the Internet has leaked into our phones, our televisions and even our kitchen appliances. It really is quite exciting, and far removed from those early, pioneering days.

But none of that detracts from the fact that, twenty-five years ago, I hacked a path through the wilderness that was the World Wild Web, cleared some land and built a homestead. And that homestead is still here. Over the years I’ve put in carpeting and electric lights, but it’s still pretty much the same. I think that’s some sort of record, and I think—even if no one else does—that is it worthy of note.