I received an email from Rudolf Ammann about a conference paper that included a reference to an old website of mine then five years into its existence. What a fun time period! (The paper was presented at Hypertext 2009, 30 June 2009, Torino, Italy)

I’m cited as a source that the “NewsPage Network” wasn’t yet “blog rolling” to use a term that couldn’t possibly have existed at that moment. I can’t say I thought of folks who used that software as a network, although I see why one could.

Several years into his news page project, Daniel Berlinger for his part had yet to put up any sort of links to kindred sites.[30] Thus, the sites that Gulker identified as a network shared a publishing tool and a publishing model but no sense of cohesion amongst each other.

(The actual citation is “Berlinger, Daniel (2000-06-06). “News from the Digital Prairie”. Circumtech. Retrieved on 2009-06-30.”)

I think that’s a fair statement.

But at roughly the same time there’s another site of mine that has pointers to a network of folks, although in a redesign not long after, they’re gone again.

And I think looking back (with all the problems and corrections and misremembering of this sort of thing) that I was writing many sites that were constantly being organized and reorganized with different themes and ideas. The Archipelago site was a eat your own dog food site for my weblog editor (named, appropriately, Archipelago). Then as FAQs rolled in and development continued the site was redesigned with new focus and features. The header image for example changed with the seasons, and eventually was automated to do so. Other sites were more about longer form writing, rather than linking to news of the day. But anyway…

Nicely done.

And a toast to all the folks who quietly brought the idea of writing on the web to life, one little bit at a time.