Manila introduced free web publishing in 1999, but most of it’s pioneering blogs from the bronze age of the Internet have disappeared from history.
Popmoderne.de started in 1996 and the original version was a complicated maze of single pages with animated GIFs and rollover-effects for the navigation buttons. It took forever to load, but I was happy creating all the eye candy in Bryce.
When I moved to Berlin in July 1999 I started working with big content management systems for Volkswagen. Big systems were expensive, but then Manila was introduced, a more or less free content management system that allowed the editing, filing and hosting of pages inside the browser. Early on you could fumble around with the open design much more than you can today. This was huge, but in Germany people didn’t see the potential of this kind of self-publishing software for everyone.
In November 1999 UserLand set up the free Manila hosting service, EditThisPage.com, which I started using in December 1999 as one of the first few hundred users. The site was either stern.EditThisPage.com or madscienceEditThisPage.com, I don’t really remember and both of them have been moved to UserLand’s manilasites.com in 2001. WayBackArchive has captured a few shots from Mad-Science.net and the early version of the Popmoderne Blog. You can see a screenshot above.
I also had a blog on the original Blogger which started in August 1999 and got lost after Google bought the company in early 2003. I was pretty much playing around with every new system coming out at that time. And I always thought the Internet would never forget, but pretty much all of my writings from 1999-2002 got lost online.
Free eBook on the early days of blogging: We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture (2002)
POPMODERNE - Behind the desk with Stefan Ernsting 