Remember Wayback When Blogging Was Fun(ny)?

It just struck me that the decade is coming to an end. The most incredible decade imaginable by most anyone’s (born before 1985) standards. It’s also marks a decade of netZoo and WOOZradio. The early days look really funny in retrospect.

2001. Ahhh… the wayback machine.

Just for kicks, let’s take a look at some of the hilarity that masqueraded as my nascent web presence:

1. Comic Sans — already sick of the limited web-friendly fonts available, I played a silly trick on the world and used the font that never dare say its own name backwards, or, as one friend righteously recently put it: “Comic Sans is the Mark of The Beast. Shit, I even used it back in 2000 when I went with the Message board-blog hybrid approach (or something).
2. I wanted to have a list of choice links — but I didn’t want to show my hand in the open. Not amid all the other highly SEO’d meta tagged engaging content on my “home page” (joke). After 9/11 I was a bit more willing to lay it all out there, thought not with quite the hyperlinked artistry of some. Basically, to copy and paste, this is how my linkblock –er, brailleroll — looked in July 2001:

   :: :::::: :: :::: :: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::: ::: ::: :::

3. I was already well-rooted as a snobby lo-fi music buff with an emphasis on Chicago indie. BUT clearly inspired from my stint as Smithsonian Folkways webmaster, I decided to profile my then-favorite albums alongside REAL AUDIO clips. Hahahaha. Mind you, before the mp3 renaissance of the late 90’s, Real Audio streams and broadcast.com were the-coolest-things-ever-invented. Surely these songs sounded better in Comic Sans.
   
4. By ’02 I had mellowed a bit. Live365 offered streaming at higher bandwidths and I focused a bit more on WOOZradio (which in its 10+ year existence has yet to break even for a month. I pay to play your music). What I could never do now that I loved doing then was music listings of concerts that I would go to in Chicago (where I lived) if I could clone myself.

Laugh at me now — I hope you had half as much fun as I had looking back into the past. The CRAZY thing is that our Comic Sans’d, hacked-together framed message board history is only a decade old. Come to think of it I should have stuck with the blank slate blogging style (with illustrations) I switched to around New Years Eve 2000. I guess I’ve been blogging for a while (with a few years off in between). We’ll look at those middle-aughts later (the WordPress years). What a decade its been!

What silly blog skeletons are gathering dust in your archive?

EXTRAS:

One of these days I’ll clean this place up… or… I’ll at least publish more often. One of these days.