It was exactly 20 years back that I had to started to blog online. Just when we finishing college, in 2001, two of my classmates from B.Tech CSE in Pondicherry Engineering College, Siva and Arun, had an idea to create something that will keep us all connected better than the only option available then – yahoomail group. It is funny to think of it now, but back then they were probably on to the first social media idea (along with several others including one Mark Z you could say 🙂 ). But unfortunately their campus placement offers were delayed and in the hustle bustle of job search they put this in the back burner. I had heard them discuss this and so thought to try it out since I had both time and access to good connectivity. I was never part of the initial discussion for a reason – I was probably the least creative as well the least knowledgeable in stuff like HTML, CSS and design in general, within our small friends group.
I named the first site ‘softklick’ and it had 5-6 static pages with one of them being the details of all our classmates like their whereabouts, email, etc and hosted it on Yahoo’s free Geocities. The biggest problem was that other than me nobody seemed to share the excitement of such a site or even respond to details that I was requesting. In hindsight it made sense – here I was – already earning salary within a week of leaving college and expecting the frustrated others who were either waiting for their company to call them or taking up makeshift jobs to reply with the same enthusiasm.
I chugged along and other than the usual “Web Design” stuff of HTML/CSS/JavaScript I also self taught PHP and MySQL as well. The problem was that free hosting providers like Geocities did not have a PHP engine and so several ‘applications’ like say a Forum or discussion chat, sharing of pictures, commenting on them etc was not possible. I hosted my site on bravepages and then on coolfreepages and finally on iwebland, each slightly better than the other. Then I stumbled upon Neopages – a forum run by Roy – a college student then. He was conducting weekly website competitions and offering free hosting to the winners with full PHP-MySQL support and 100MB. I tried and after a few weeks of tinkering and refining the ‘softklick’ website, I actually managed to win in this ‘competition’. I shared the news with my classmates and thought it was going to be the start of something great – but again I was, as expected met with almost complete silence. I should mention that Baptist, Pravish, Mugilan and Karthika along with a few more friends did try and respond.
Eventually I gave up on the classmates ‘social media’ stuff and just went on to personal blogging – the first post on March 2003, using ‘Tabulas’ a blogging platform hosted by the same ‘Roy’ and after 7 years there (till it got closed down) moved to blogger, moveabletype and eventually to WordPress hosted first on free on GoDaddy (offered to few selected users of GoDaddy and to their credit, they have kept their promise of ‘free’ till today – Mar’2023). Most of what I used to write was private – ‘For My Eyes Only’, to be read by future me and wonder how naive I was back then, but over the years, I have opened up more and hence the rise in public posts. Also, I was always of the notion that no one else ever reads my blogs, but friends from all walks of my life have surprised me once in a while by bringing it up and asking if they were the motivation behind some posts. This made me curious and I installed a page view counter plugin and can you believe this site gets 100-150 unique visitors each day. I was thinking it would be something like <10. I still think it is probably some web crawlers and search engines but you never know 🙂