First Post!

Remember the orange “B” favicon on your blog? Most of the newbie blogger use it. Some of my friends still use it. Well, what do you know? Many old-time bloggers start their journey here. So did I. That is Blogger and this is the first post of the once called “head blogger guy”. Evan Williams is (was) the co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs who created Blogger in 1999 (later being acquired by Google on 2003). His first post was a short post with no actual title (except what the permalink stated as “I just got new DSL connection via” which was the first line of that post). The date was February 4, 1999. Here it is.

I just got a new DSL connection via PacBell Internet. I had my doubts — dealing with the phone company and all — that it was ever going to happen, and there were some snafus: they did keep their appt. (2 weeks after I’d ordered it), but the 2-hour installation stretched into six (and still wasn’t completed). The installer was pretty clueless. But it was all worth it. It’s the “slow” one: 384k – 1.5mb downstream/128k upstream ($49/month), but oh-my-god is it fast! Faster even than most corporate connections I’ve been on. I’ve dreampt of this day. The world is a brighter place! :)

Oh yes Ev, the world is a brighter place now :) Here is what Evan himself said over email.

Hi, Eric. Sounds cool.

Yes, that was my first *public* post. Evhead was my own private note-taking space, living on my desktop, before I made it public. The script I used to publish it was repurposed for an internal blog at Pyra, then turned into a public blog for Pyra, then turne into Blogger. (Evhead was moved over to Blogger a few months later.)

Ev.

[Thanks to Evan and thanks, Puji for the link]

If you see colorful fruits image on a blog, you probably just visited this guy’s blog. He is Jeff Gates or better known as his blog title, Life Outtacontext. My little digging work has brought me to his archive where I found his first post I am COTR on February 9, 2001. As the latest routine, I personally e-mailed Jeff, and this is what I got in return.

Eric, thanks for the email.

Yes, 000115.shtml was my first post. HOWEVER, my second post (http://outtacontext.com/life/archive/000116.shtml) really set the stage for a major part of my writing (and it’s one of my favorite pieces).

Sure, feel free to publish my first post. But consider publishing the second as it’s more indicative of where my blog went.

Boy, those were the days. I was publishing a blog seven months before Movable Type debuted. What was I thinking? -grin

Best, Jeff

Thanks Jeff. Certainly. We are not only looking for the very first post but also the very first post that set motion to your blogging time. So this time it’s a bit different. This is his second post Underground Magic on February 22, 2001.

As we walked through the door she began her incantation. Raising her hands before her, eyes closed, she began:

I wish, I wish with all my heart
To fly with dragons in the land of heart

I stared, transfixed, as she repeated her words again and again. I knew her chant from her favorite cartoon show. And I took special note of a four year old’s version of an often-heard rhyme.

Her eyelids moved to the beat of her voice. When she stopped her eyes slowly opened and looked at me. “Now, I’ll teach you how to make a wish. If you say it two times, you get to make two wishes.�
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I smiled a deep smile. It had been a tough day at work and if this was a sign of things to come, I couldn’t have asked for a better one! I looked around, suddenly aware we weren’t alone. We were on stage, as my 4 year old daughter and I always were, in the subway car on our commute home.

Only one man had taken notice of us. Considering the strength of my daughter’s voice, I was surprised more people weren’t watching us. As she chanted he smiled, but stifled it and looked away whenever our eyes met. I was now enjoying both of them. The dance between her recital and his face was something special. When we arrived at his station, he stopped just long enough to say what an amazing spirit she had. I was sorry to see him go.

This was the second performance of the day. On our morning commute, as we rode the slow elevator to the surface, she and I were packed tightly with others. In the public/private solitude, traditional in this venue, she suddenly broke the rules by loudly proclaiming “I love you, daddy!� in her best theatrical voice.

The smiles were audible and I felt like her carnival accomplice, her shill, trying to bring unsuspecting people into our fold. She, of course, knew exactly what she was doing.

That is a nice post.

p.s. For those of you visiting Jeff’s blog, I’ll give you a little tip. You may also want to try the index page. The www.outtacontext.com. My favourite is the story of his past. Enjoy :)

Hi man,…It’s time for joke and unserious thingy. It’s time for Bastardly! Bastardly is a gossip blog (isn’ it, huh?) or whatever type of blog where you could find everything about bitch in the whole universe. It’s more like a bitching central rather than the usual boring blog (huh?). Certainly. It’s more fun and challanging rather than our slave job, who are just raping the other’s first post rather than enjoying the beautiful legs of Paris Hilton, the kinky nipples (oops!…sorry girl) of Bai Ling, the nasty (you have to admit it, girl) boobs of Lindsay Lohan. Please… stooop! I’m not speaking for bastardly, I’m speaking for First Post! blog. Bastardly dudes are Moe, Jackson, and Mellisa and their first post is back to 11th May 2004 on Work Life. Hey, I’m lying when I told you about the boring job of digging first posts. We’re still enjoying. Like I said, it’s time for gossip.

I am your typical, 9-5 robot, BUT I have interesting friends who will add some humor to this nerdy Blog that will attempt to digitally document random events in our lives. There will probably be no audience in the first 10 years, but we’ll see what happens after that! All I can promise is scandal, money, gambling & all the sins of the world in one complicated web of (hopefully coherent) thoughts.

And here’s the email, when their replied my questions:

Jackson & Melissa are the other two.

PRetty cool idea for a blog, man :-)

best of luck

Thanks, dudes!

This is the guy who author the book that I read, Designing with Web Standards. Aside from blogging on his domain, he is also the founder and creative director of Happy Cog Studios and A List Apart. He also once a contributor of Web Standards Project. In short, he is quite an important person in web standards. After doing some digging, I find it difficult to find Zeldman’s first post. I only find a post titled My Glamorous Life which has no date (but reading the next post, I guess it was year 2000). So I e-mailed him. And this is the reply that I got.

My first post is from 1995.

It’s no longer available.

If you want, you could use this:

“My first post is from 1995. It’s no longer available.”

Good luck with the project — it’s a great idea, and very cool.

As you wish :) But really 1995 is a long long time ago. Salute!

It’s time for us to write about the Best Page in the Universe. At least that’s what the author, Maddox, proclaimed. I don’t know about the best but he is certainly popular by listed as the number 13 on Technorati 100 Popular Blogs. His first post dated back to July 30, 1998 titled About Stress and Sanity (You Might Go Crazy). That’s a massive archive he got there.

Here’s the deal: you get too stressed out, and you’ll go crazy. They’ll lock you up. Trust me, I know. Everyone has a puddle of sanity in their head. Stress is like a sponge that soaks up sanity. You don’t want it to soak up all your sanity because you’ll lose your grip.

Soon everyone will start calling you names like beaver brains and chowder head. Your only friends will be office supplies. They never laugh at you, or call you names, or pretend like they’re your friends long enough for you to do their homework and stab you in the back while they go out to their fancy parties for fancy people with nice clothes and slick dyed hair, the kind of hair that all the kids try to mimic because they think that the hair will make them cool and saucy and they listen to live and bush, and they go to the canyons and sit around camp fires, holding hands and singing songs like everybody else would do if they had enough time and money or if they had a job that they didn’t have to work at night and day so they could have a few minutes to compose their thoughts and register for school in time so they don’t get jabbed with another $20 late fee that they can’t pay for because they’ve been working long hours for some uncaring corporate demons in a hot, humid, dirty building with gum meaded into the carpets and feces erupting from the toilets with a smell so pungent as to elicit vomiting if not worse, since they’ve been 16 years old, day after day without any rest, ever.

No, office supplies just do what they’re told. They sit there quietly, holding papers together, faxing documents or counting figures. They almost never scream at you and demand answers you don’t have. They always follow orders, and they never talk back. They don’t pretend to be nice and full of integrity while whoring themselves out to every jerk that comes along and woos them with their good looks. Office supplies are friends.

Actually this is not Maddox’s first post. But it was the first that’s accessible for visitors. Here’s what he told us.

My first official post was about communists, and it was one line long: “Commies are dumb.”

But the first post anyone can access is the one in the ’98 page.

Did I mentioned that this is a cool site? :)

Anonymuis is not the same with anonymous. She began blogging anonymously in the month of September, 3 years ago. I was trying to dig into her archive and found her write something okay! on 19th September 2002 as her very first post.

okay now let me see,i just got this blogtool from somewhere hmmm….i hope this won’t be bad idea that i’ve regis. this blog.Let me see that i don’t need book and pen again to write abt my daily day…

Another entry about Indonesian blogger. But not just an ordinary one. He is considered by many Indonesian bloggers as the founding father of Indonesian blog (hm, it is “Bapak blog Indonesia” I hope I got the English translation right). He is currently was (Thanks, Enda!) working as a copywriter. I see he is quite active in Indonesian blog community. He is also a contributor in Global Voices. You can see his first post on September 26, 2001 titled Post Pertama. Note: The link goes to Enda’s current blog at goblogmedia.com. While actually his first post were still using Blogger and hosted by tripod. You can also see his first post on his old blog.

Post pertama gue setelah gue ga sengaja ketemu ama Blogger :)
Gue bikin juga sih yang personal journal.. but since that one is personal ya berarti ga gue liat-liatin dong.
Dan yang personal itu lebih pertama dari yang ini. Sebelom ketemu Blog ini gue juga udah mikir2x gimana caranya bikin personal journal yang gampang diupdate, tapi juga ga males ngisi karena gampang dan ada di tempat yg bisa aksesible ke gue..dan untung akhirnya gue ketemu caranya..

Jadi.. apaan sebenernya Blog?
Blog merupaka kependekan dari Weblog dimana seseorang bikin log dari perjalanan di di web. Dimulai dari pertama kali internet ada. blog pertama mungkin yg dibuat sama pencipta Mosaic, Marc Adreesen sama halaman What’s New-nya.. sejak itu ada beberapa orang lagi yang buat Blog juga.
Tapi kemudian jadi banyak banget setelah ada si Blogger ini. Blogger ini adalah layanan gratis buat orang2x yang mau bikin Blog juga, selain dia masih ada beberapa lagi layanan online dan juga yang berupa aplikasi.
Blog awalnya berguna karena dia bertindak semacam filter informasi yang ter-compile oleh seseorang dengan preference, kesenengan, dan sentiment dia. Adaa orang2x yang rada2x ga ada kerjaan.
Tapi kemudian ada beberapa website Blog yang kemudia jadi ngetop banget dimana orang2x pada ngikutin apa yang dia kerjain.
Dan akhirnya jadi itu, ga sekedar apa yg dikerjain di internet, tapi juga apa yg dipikirin, apa yg dikerjain masuk juga.. dan fine by me aja..

Buat yang pengen tahu sejarah Blog bisa dilihat di An Incomplete Annotated History of Weblogs sama di Weblogs: A History and Perspective

Blog gue ini bakal ada disini skrg, dan kamu yg -entah kenapa- berminat mengikuti perjalanan gue.. ceilee.. bisa datang dan pergi ke website ini..
Buat kamu yang pengen bikin Blog juga silakan aja datang ke Blogger, ga susah kok tapi perlu pengetahuan tentang HTML dikit.

Ok buat terciptanya Blog gue ini gue perlu mengucapkan terimakasih sama Blogger dan juga Togap Siagian yang menunjukkan ke Blogger secara ga sengaja.

For now.. BLOG ON!

Andy and his waxy.org blog is surely popular. Right now he is listed as number 66 on Technorati 100 Popular Blogs. His first post was… well apparently there was no title on it. But the date was on April 14, 2002. All I got is that two words on his permalink “the_basi”, what is that supposed to mean? UPDATE: Okay, just follow the permalink and you will see.. yes, it’s Andy’s first post’s title “The Basic Idea”. So, that’s what the_basi means :)

So, I’ve never really had a personal website. For the last seven years or so, I used the Generic Website as a placeholder for a site that never came. Sure, there were always little nooks and crannies hiding under that blank page, but I figured it was finally time for something a little more substantial.

I can’t promise I’ll keep to these, but here are the rules:

1. No journaling, unless it’s relevant to people who don’t know me. Example: “Today I went down to 7-11 and bought a Slurpee. Strawberry is my favorite flavor!”

2. No tired memes, unless I have something to add. Example: “Take this quiz and find out which Smurf you are! I’m Jokey!”

3. Be original.

Thanks to the close friends who, until this point, have put up with my endless links and web commentary in instant messages and e-mail.