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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Today in History: the Birth of the Bleat |
| 2007-02-02 |
| It's James Lileks' tenth blogiversary. This is what the Bleat looked like the day it began a decade ago. Ten years! In internet years, I’m already dead. The graphic above is an approximation of the original banner, which was intended to mimic the look of the KEDS logo on the back of my childhood sneakers. Really. The first entry was nothing special, but it contained references to Jasper Dog and the Giant Swede, both of which are still with us. Otherwise, a few things have changed. I was living at 5226 Girard Avenue South, writing on an underwhelming Performa with a 630 X 480 screen; no iTunes, rudimentary video-in, no TiVo, no broadband. The site was hosted on AOL. Yet we were happy. Why, we didn’t know we were poor. The main index page had a link to the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which was about 30 pages long with tiny grainy graphics. I didn’t have a scanner – I imported graphics by shooting them with a video camera and using a rudimentary screen-capture card to get the image into Photoshop. Of course, back then we called it “Rotogravure Shop,” and we wore onions on our belts as was the custom in those times. If you’d told me that I’d get a book out of the Gallery in four years, I would have been delighted. In 1997 I had come to believe my career had stalled for good, after all. I started the Bleat because “web diaries” were all the rage, and the website - begun a year earlier – had become my primary means of filling my empty hours. I had a lot of empty hours. Within a few months, everything would change . . . Happy Bleatday/Blogiversary/whatever-you-call-it to one of the world's great writers |
| Posted by:Mike |