Back in the mid to late 90s, my search engine of choice was InfoSeek.
As InfoSeek never returned any relevant hits for my favourite film of all time, I decided to make a website for it. I spent hours after school using their computers to take screen captures from a VHS copy of the film I had taped from broadcast TV. If you wanted high res (640*480!) captures, wave files from the film, or if for some odd reason you wanted to read a teen's take on how an artificial intelligence might think, my website was the place to go.
Even the Wayback Machine wouldn't bring it back now, but far better things have come along since.
More than a decade later, I have this website. So far I have just been using it to get myself into the habit of writing regularly, regardless of how inspired I feel. The public nature of it makes me less inclined to slack off.
But what am I doing here? Other than navel-gazing, of course.
I miss the bad old days where every site I hit was either academic in nature or a great storytelling experiment. Or an 'under construction' page. Marketers hadn't really gotten the hang of the web, then.
That said, in those days most organisations I searched for didn't have a web page, and instead I had to wait to call them during office hours to find out what I needed. And the ability to buy anything online was still a ways off.
I don't miss the blink tag, either.
So.
There's a lot to be said for the current state of the web.
My nostalgia still drives me, however. I hope that eventually I'll be able to capture some of the unfettered weirdness, some of the great stories, that seemed to be easier to find back when bevels were cool. The stuff that used to get put up before people started fretting about whether Google knew who they were.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin.
