There is something slightly surreal about opening the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and staring at a digital sweep of my own website captured on Thursday, December 11, 2003.
Back then, the homepage felt compelled to offer a polite, earnest public service announcement explaining what a "weblog" actually was. That was in case a wayward visitor thought they had stumbled into an obscure departmental bulletin. It proudly offered an AvantGo badge for PDA users synchronizing via desktop cradles, and cheerfully displayed both my home landline and mobile numbers to anyone on the World Wide Web with an internet connection.
At the time, Blogger had only just been acquired from Pyra Labs by a young, ambitious outfit called Google. In internet years, two decades is several geologic epochs. Yet despite Google's legendary habit of sending beloved products to the corporate graveyard, Blogger is still quietly running the machinery in the background.
The surrounding scaffolding, headers, and fonts have evolved over the last twenty-three years, but the core text remains untouched. More than two decades later, the words typed on a winter morning in 2003 sit exactly where they were put, still chronicling the road east over the Rockies.
