Little 15

Another year has slipped quietly out the back door and this site turns 15 this week. Fifteen years. That doesn’t sound particularly terrifying until you remember that in 1994 most people still regarded the Internet as something involving academics, blinking modems and men with questionable facial hair.

In web years, fifteen is practically prehistoric. This site was born a few months before Netscape Navigator, back when the web was still a sparsely populated frontier rather than the gigantic shopping mall it would eventually become.

There were no blogs. No social networks. No RSS feeds. Google didn’t exist. YouTube and Flickr were still a decade away. MP3s had yet to turn the music industry into a smoking crater, and having an email address still made you seem vaguely technical and possibly dangerous.

We connected through modems that screamed like small animals being tortured and then waited patiently while photographs materialized one horizontal line at a time. And we liked it. Tell that to the kids today and they won’t believe you.

Writing a blog post on a dubious computer in Yazd, Iran.

Somehow, through browser wars, dot-com bubbles, Flash intros, Web 2.0, social media and dancing hamsters, Mink Machine survived. So did I.

Fifteen years later, I still use the web every day for work, travel, writing, photography, finding obscure information and occasionally wasting an impressive amount of time accomplishing absolutely nothing.

To everyone who has stopped by over the years, the regulars, the newcomers, the old-timers, the accidental Google visitors, the stars and the ghosts of Christmas past, thanks for tuning in.

Happy birthday, my teenage website. May your links remain unbroken, your database uncorrupted and your page requests continue returning HTTP 200 for many years to come. Because on the Internet, fifteen years without a complete nervous breakdown is something worth celebrating.