Thanks for wishing us a happy five years blogging Mr. PapaScott 🙂 Sorry for missing yours. Happy belated five years for you too.
It’s getting real close to my own 5 year EditThisPage anniversary. It’s a good opportunity for me elaborate on my own personal history a bit:
Back then, I was already a blogger, maintaining my personal site using a free version of Frontier for Windows, amongst other hand built tools of my own. Blogging was so new, I was, in fact, the only known blogger in all of Knight Ridder, the company I was working for. Additionally, I was publishing a RSS feed on the Kosovo war that was being aggregated by My.Userland and My.Netscape. These efforts brought me some visibility in the company, and more than a little notoriety with some folks there. Many thought I should not be doing what I was, and should stop. A good thing I didn’t.
When Dan Gillmor was exploring options to run his weblog, word had reached him about me, and he asked for my opinion. Whether Dan using Manila (DaveNet: Oct. 25, 1999) was influenced by me, or the other way around – I have no idea anymore – but one thing was for sure, I had to have a way to experiment outside the confines of work. I didn’t want simply extend my ego online with a new blog about myself, hense PhillyFuture was born.
Happy anniversary to you, to us, to Manila and to its gone, but not forgotten hosting environment EditThisPage.
EditThisPage and Blogger.com (Blogger.com preceded EditThisPage (DaveNet: Dec. 08, 1999) by a couple months I think, while Manila, the software behind EditThisPage, came out almost simultaneously with it) provided models that it seems all other blogging tools and environments have looked to for inspiration and have striven to improve upon.
One thing I need to add: I miss working with Dan and the folks at KR. Being surrounded by journalists and their idealism during that time was something special. Especially Dan. Our talks about technology were just terrific.
All of us were kinda like homesteaders back then. But in my humble opinion ? it’s now when things get interesting. After all ? you need to have paved roads to have a Mustang, and our roads aren’t all the way there yet, but are getting close. And the Lord knows ? I want a Mustang!