I have been wondering recently how I have managed to write online for 7 years, and - perhaps more amazingly - how I’ve managed to keep hold of the majority of my writing during that time.
It all began in the early 1990s - Compuserve and AOL were fighting each other to the death, and a strange new “thing” was being talked about in the press called the “World Wide Web”. It existed in academia, and Compuserve were talking about bundling the software to access it.
For a couple of years I couldn’t figure out why anybody would want a “web site” - what they would use it for, or what purpose it would serve. I remember being offered webspace while opening my first account with an “Internet Service Provider”, and asking them why I would ever need it.
“People like to write stuff, and share it with the world”
I still didn’t get it.
Fast forward a couple of years, and the World Wide Web had become ubiquitous. I had built the company website, and was spending increasing amounts of time online away from work.
I’m not entirely sure how, when or why it happened, but I became interested in building a website. I do recall a clear decision that the easiest thing to build would be something to do with writing, because all you had to deal with would be text. I didn’t know anything about webservers, or the programming languages they used. I did know about databases, and I knew HTML - so I set about building a righteous hack.
I would ask people to email me short stories, I would add them to the database, and then run a macro to turn it all into HTML files - essentially a huge ass fake website. I think the first week we had five stories - three of which were probably my own.
I called it “Thought Cafe”.
History might have ended the story right there - but history doesn’t tend to work like that - it’s never quite as predictable as you might expect.
The site ended up being re-written first in ASP, and then PHP. Eventually there were thousands of members, tens of thousands of stories, feedback, forums, and everything else you might expect to find in a modern website.
The wheels began to fall off when the community reached the peculiar tipping point that allowed the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” to kick in; the theory (invented by Penny Arcade) states that any normal person, when handed anonymity, a platform, and an audience, will essentially become a complete asshole. That’s exactly what happened to a number of the “authors” (I could use far more derogatory terms for them, but will refrain).
ThoughtCafe closed it’s doors one Sunday afternoon. It was no longer fun. I had set out to experiment with the web, and ended up babysitting a community of thousands.
For months I hardly used the internet.
One Friday morning, a colleague pointed me towards an article in a magazine about people sharing their lives online; writing a public diary on a website called “LiveJournal”. He made a throwaway comment that would be far reaching;
“You could build that”.
By the end of lunchtime I had a personal version of LiveJournal written - hacked together with the software equivalent of bubblegum and sticky tape. It was online, and it worked. I showed it to the same colleague.
“oh cool - that’s a Blog!”
“a what?”
It turned out he had been playing with a webite by Pyra Labs called “Blogger”, that provided the engineering to do pretty much the same thing.
“You should release that as open source”
And so began a two year odyssey - I ended up writing a PHP script called “BLOG”, that became one of the popular early blogging solutions. As these things tend to do, it evolved, grew, and slowly consumed all of my “free” time. It forked into two projects; a blog, and a content management system (the term “Content Management System” didn’t exist at the time - but that’s exactly what I had built).
One day in 2003 (I think) some perspective kicked in. What on earth was I doing? I had hacked together an online journal so I could have something of my own on the web. I had ended up building a software platform, and supporting hundreds of people using it.
In order to prevent the temptation of tinkering with my creation any further, I asked a friend on the other side of the world what she was using to run her blog.
“Oh, it’s this new thing called WordPress - it’s still very new, and a bit unstable, but it gets the job done”.