Hand-written HTML
Today is the 22nd anniversary of the Lunar Obverse blog on this domain, bamoon.com. I have a calendar entry that tells me I bought the domain on this day in 2002 but that’s not right; I bought the domain itself on 7 January 2001. I just didn’t do anything with it until 17 September 2002. I bought two other domains on that January day and I still own all of them. The other two are lunarobverse.com, and brian-moon.com.
What I wanted to purchase were moon.com, and lunar.com but even as early in the domain registration history as 2001 all of those had already been purchased and used. moon.com and lunar.com were both registered in 1994; and I would have sworn that brianmoon.com was already registered when I was looking for domains but according to the age checker, brianmoon.com was registered in 2005. I could have had my own damned name this whole damned time. Dammit.
So I don’t have to celebrate the anniversary of my domain just yet. I would like to celebrate this blog, though. I think the first host for this place was on an old internet service run by Steve Jackson Games out of Austin, TX, known as Illuminati Online, or IO.com for short. That service goes even farther back, having been a bulletin board system (BBS), run on personal computers and accessed by calling in over phone landlines, but I was never cool or rich enough to make long distance calls for chat and games. All the BBS’s I dialed in to had local numbers, or 800 numbers, like GEnie.
But in the late 90s I did finally get an email address at IO.com, and in my personal directory, I hand-wrote some HTML pages, used a simple graphics program to make a logo for Lunar Obverse, and started posting stories. The URL for it was something like http (no https yet) colon slash slash io dot com slash users slash public-html slash ~bmoon, and I was proud of it and the stories I posted there. I knew enough to know that this URL was never going to roll off the tongue (or the fingers) like apple.com but it was mine to post whatever I wanted.
At XOXO this year, Molly White started her talk by asking us to remember the first time the internet felt like magic. That old collection of HTML is mine. I probably have all those old files saved somewhere; I’m a digital packrat and tend to archive rather than delete. But whether or not those binaries are stored somewhere, the memories live on in my head. I wrote for the world wide web. I wasn’t special. Anyone could do it. That, paradoxically, is what made it special.
Eventually, after we survived Y2K, services like Blogger sprang up, providing homes for written word websites, and I moved my blog there. I am reasonably certain that Blogger is where I finally got to use bamoon.com, and this place reached it’s next form. I’ve written before about the transition from Blogger to bespoke blogging software written by a long-lost friend, and hosted on that friend’s server, my own computer, and now eminently portable as a WordPress site, so I won’t recount that story here. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of memories at this uniform resource locator (URL). Many many stories, and many more to come.
Thanks for reading, happy to have you here.