The ancient not-yet-a-blog

I looked at my old website (carefully archived/hidden in the depths of my laptop), and read through the blog-like entries I used to write periodically from 11 April 1998 to 14 July 2000. A few things struck me:

• I used to hand-code and hand-archive these entries in Dreamweaver. After writing each entry as a separate HTML page, I’d insert the code into the combo-box selector for my entries and upload everything to the server using FTP. Was I ever this patient?! What the fuck.
• Perhaps as a result of the hassle, I only uploaded an average of 12 entries a year. However, these entries tended to be a lot more reflective than my current nonsense — my previous post was on USB takoyaki, for goodness’ sake — and I only actually wrote when I had something to write, not when something amused me and I wanted to point it out to my friends and other random visitors (hello!).
• Without a comments or referrer system (such dark, dark ages), I had no clue who was actually reading my stuff; occasionally, someone would surprise me by telling me “That sounds a lot like what you last wrote on your website” and I would go “You mean you actually read that shit?! WHY WHY WHY?!”. (No, really.)
• Nobody called it a “blog” back then, but we’re all tired of hearing about “blogging before the term was even in use”, aren’t we.
• I wrote in a far less restrained manner than I do now. All that youthful exuberance has drained away over the years. Or maybe I’ve started to care about what people think when they read this, given that I know this time that people actually do, umm, read this. And see all my terrible grammar and sentence structures on display, for all to see my terrible sentence grammar. On display. Structure?
• I do like this one line I found, even though I find it very hard to believe I wrote it five years ago: “I still claim very often that my head hurts, because it doesn’t, but I’m sure it should.”

I really won’t post any of my old entries on this site, because… I don’t know why, but I’ll think of a suitably poor reason and neglect to tell anyone. Sorry. Here’s the silly little Photoshop graphic header I made for the old site, though.

I don’t know where I got those random words from. I don’t know where they went, either.