Around the end of my senior year, I registered for free web hosting. This wasn’t my first web site: a year or two prior, I had decided to make the biggest joke collection ever. Then I planned to expand it into an index of the Internet - like Yahoo!, but all mine.
Five years ago, these goals were realistic. At the time, the entire World Wide Web consisted of Yahoo!, AOL, and 46 home pages with distracting backgrounds and obnoxious animated graphics.
I started the site and dubbed it BrockHaven (this was right around the time I started calling myself Brock). I had never heard of a “weblog,” and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. It was, effectively, the first blog I’d ever seen, and lasted a full six posts (three times the average LiveJournal account).
I’ve gone looking for it now and then over the past several years, just to see if it was still up. Until a few months ago, it was. When I couldn’t get to it sometime during Winter quarter, I figured it was gone forever and lamented the fact that I’d never backed it up for nostalgia’s sake.
For some reason, I was inclined to look for it again today. It was back online, with the counter reset to 0. I saved all the pages, removed the banner ads the server added, and now, against my better judgment, I give you BrockHaven, the very first blog in the history of communication.
Please note that the “days till college” counter says I’ve been in college for 1,318 days now. This fact makes me feel older than I thought it would.
Tags: angst, brockhaven, high_school, history
Dude, that reminds me of my first webpage I did for a HTML class in high school. It was just about me and had info about all my friends. Possibly the first facebook
Truly, we are Internet pioneers.
In 1997 I designed my middle school’s first website, a butt-ugly yellow page with far too many GraphicConverter mouse-drawn GIFs. It was the first time I got to use a digital camera too, an Apple QuickTake 100 at a whopping 640×480. The replacement hasn’t turned out much better.