complicated simplicity

I started my first blog 8 years ago. I was in school then, and there was no such thing known as a blogging system then. Windows 98 was hot, mIRC and ICQ were cool. I started out blogging at http://www.singnet.com.sg/~XYZ/, the local hosting site for Singnet. At that time, blogging meant hard-coding your blog post, and manually upload every article using WS_FTP leh. Shag. Archive means start new page, and rename your old page. I started blogging when I learnt how to Microsoft Frontpage to do my first website… As well as meeting the first important girl in my life.

After a year or so, free hosting sites came about. Geocities, Angelfire was the new in-thing. Along with all the ads, but we all tahan and used it, cos there were no better alternatives. Still remembered the times I roamed the many sites with song lyrics (My heart will go on!) and shareware, before adware came about. About this time, it was my time for the national exams, so my interested in maintaining a constant web presence waned. But still I was active in website design, and kept up with the latest technology. At that time, it was iFrame and IE5. And then I was introduced to Dreamweaver. I still hardcoded my posts and uploaded them via FTP. There was still no system; every line, word, picture, song and animation was hardcoded in .HTML and uploaded daily for the non-existant loyal readers who were then on 56k modems.

At this time I started a sister blogging site called PoST: Poems of the Silent Truth. This sister site was where I posted some of my literary compositions, when I suffered in silence. It was about this time as well that I was introduced to one of the first few blogging engines, it was called b2. That changed my life.

Tags: angelfire, b2, blog, blogging, geocities, history, Personal, wordpress

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