early web

The trailer for the Two Towers movie is online (a full trailer, not just the sneak preview)! Thanks to Allison for the URL. It's pretty obviously a bootleg, but it still looks pretty cool.

Busy day yesterday. Finished my chapter for Moira's book and sent it in. Wrote a new column for Muse's Muse (thanks for your patience, Jodi!) for next month.

Jeff and I are going to the cottage tomorrow, will be back next Tuesday. Apparently the phone lines aren't working at the cottage and no one can figure out why, so I might not be Blathering until I get back.

Today's Blatherpic (click on the image to get a bigger version) is from the first edition of "HTML & CGI Unleashed" (Sam's Publishing, 1995). Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, I created a fairly simple personal homepage that linked to other personal sites including Urban Tapestry, a Sara site (how many of you remember that? I'm curious...), and the first incarnation of Inkspot.

Inkspot was chosen as Cool Site of the Day by Infinet in early 1995 back in the days when there was only one "Cool Site of the Day" award. I had a visitor counter at the bottom of the page, and I remember sitting in front of my computer for at least an hour, hitting the return key over and over again just to see the visitor count jump by leaps and bounds. Over 10,000 people visited Inkspot that day. This number may not mean much now, but back then not many people were on the Web. I remember being so excited that I went to tell Jeff, who was still asleep. He was pretty crabby at me for waking him up. Later on in the day he apologized. :-)

The flurry of attention I got from the media and the online community as a result was what helped convince me to expand Inkspot, which was one page of links for children's writers back then. Anyway, one of the resulting e-mails I received was from a writer named John December (what a GREAT name, that), who asked if he could use a screenshot of my personal homepage in his book, as a sample of a personal homepage. I said yes, of course.

Here's what he wrote about me:


"Figure 2.10 shows Debbie Ridpath Ohi's home page. Her page is typical in that she creates a "personal information space" that links to personal and professional information. She links to resources that she maintains or develops, including a list of Children's Writer's Resources, "INKSPOT" (http://interlog.com/~ohi/dmo-pages/writers.html), a page of the WWW Virtual Library, "Writers' Resources On The Web" (http://www.interlog.com/~ohi/www/writesource.html), and her other activities, including her music group, an electronic magazine (E-zine) that she's developing, and personal and "fun" links.


The e-zine to which he was referring was called "The Electric Penguin" (sound familiar?), but I shut it down once I started focussing on Inkspot.

From time to time I think about reviving it again...but then I worry about it becoming another Inkspot.

Funny to hear personal homepages being written about back then as if they're so unusual, like a species of rare animal. But I suppose back then, they were.





(Above pic: close-up of the screenshot John December used in his book. The page counter is inaccurate; I used a pretty flakey one that tended to reset itself spontaneously from time to time.)