This may seem a little weird, but I was checking my webstats for the blog and I saw that one of the Googlebots came across it. That prompted curiosity on my part to see if I could find this page by searching for it. I didn’t find my site yet, but I sure found some other stuff.

I got into the web around 1996 or 1997, right when the internet was becoming more mainstream. I remember using Netscape Composer to build websites back then (I wasn’t cool enough to be one of those guys who coded their entire site in Notepad) and the coolest webpages had billions of animated GIFs, a tiled background, and a guestbook. Most of the search results I found were my signing of other people’s guestbooks in hopes of having them come and sign MY guestbook.

The other cool thing to do was to display all of the “awards” that your site had won. They were basically just cooked up images that ANYONE could create. All anyone had to do to get the award was ask for it and then link back to your site. It was all pretty ridiculous, but then again, no one knew better. I actually found one of my awards still being displayed on some site that I have no recollection of ever visiting.

Wow, memories.