When I started my webpage back in (mmf-mmf-mff) the 1990’s or late ’80’s…I had a hit counter. A year or so on, it died, it died. I gave myself 350,000 posts (as a very conservative estimate) and reconstituted it. As it was in, I think, the 400,000’s…we moved north. When we set up again, I restarted it, and picked, oh, 350,000 posts as a fair start. The counter died again a few years back and I picked 350,000 as a starting figure.
I was so planning a celebration when it would finally, from all kinds of fair starts, top 500,000. We were somewhere aroun 490100. And it seems to have died the death. Waaa! There goes my celebration. I’m giving it a while in the case it will wake up and start counting visitors again. But witness, it was 490100 or thereabouts. I’ve been so determined to count only ‘real’ visits. I have absolutely refused to ‘cheat’ on the count, because, pardon me, many commercial sites lie through their teeth.
Sigh.
Got a rate?
Extrapolate!
And set a date!
It’ll still be more reliable than other websites’ counts.
😆 I think you’re right.
The internet’s wonky today—I think it’s the election, all those machines, y’know—so I entertain hope the Counter will wake up and come through, but it’s getting a dimmer and dimmer possibility!
Sorry to nitpick, but the web was invented around 1990, and it wasn’t publicly available until 1991-1992, and even then it was mostly used by scientists. The first graphical web browser was Mosaic, and didn’t appear until 1993… The web didn’t explode as a user commodity until 1996 or so.
THanks, lektu—I’m sure you’re right: seems I’ve been welded to a computer in some form since forever, and I was trying to think of it re when I moved to a certain house. I knew the web from the library loan thing, fairly early; but had no direct dealing with it in that form, just knew people who were doing it. It must have been mid 90’s that we began realizing this was the way to go—I tend to forget the 90’s have numbers in them: for some reason that decade just slips out of my reckoning, for good or for ill—a long blur of interlocking family crises. I was doing direct transmission of my novels to NYC back in DOS and BB days—I’d turn things in on the old Centronics printer, but I had a version in which I embedded printer codes in visible form, so you could get from my little Atari 48k machine to the monsters (probably all of 100k) used by the printing industry—I used something like IX (italics on) and IZ (italics off) and such, and then the printer’d global the changes in—which is why I remember committing text to the electronic world early. All this was usually on 5 1/4 floppy, until the printer stunned my publisher, as I recall the incident, by wanting to do dial-up transmission—maybe that was Baen; I can’t remember. But it wasn’t the internet yet. It made my publisher nervous as all getout, and the fact I actually embedded instructions to the printer at the top of my files would have produced an apoplexy in the publishing house if they’d known I was (gasp) talking directly to a printer. But I couldn’t get the publisher-guys to explain accurately to the printer what the deal was—so I went stealth on the communications.
As is, you’d be quite right, and it’s important to keep track of these things, lest ye have novels in which you have internet in the wrong era.
Were you on usenet back in the day? That started in the 1980s and my dad definitely was using it in the mid-80s because he used to print stuff out from there. Freaked me out a bit when I saw a pre-’90s date on some papers of his. Usenet was one of my first fannish spaces and it is still alive and well after all these years even if in a diminished form. I used to frequent alt.startrek.creative and alt.xfiles as a 14 year old (pretending to be the age I am now…weird). There were spaces for general scifi and books as well. I still run into people from back then. Last year on lj I bumped into the lady I sent my first email ever to. It was feedback for her fan fiction I read. I was a good little reader back then.
I love looking at the Internet wayback machine to see how things used to be.
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
They’ve got you going back to 1996 when they started keeping records. Be ready to freak out. It’s like baby pictures. Should take a screen cap in case it ever goes down for good.
Ha! Well, even if you were not on usenet yourself your books were a topic there back in the early 1980s. And since the users leaned nerd back then there’s actually a lot of cool science, scifi, and music talk recorded. Nerds debating if U2 or Duran Duran were better and thinking it was crazy it might take until 1997 to see the last Star Wars movie. If they only knew.
Back in the day, besides rec.arts.sf.written there was the cherryhlist mailing list. Still there, too. I don’t know when it as founded – I think I started following it in the early 90s but I think it was around before then.
I plugged into it fairly early, but sparsely. Then spent my most egregious activity on old Compuserve’s sf section—for a while. Dupa T Parrot surfaced the other day—on Facebook.
Oh darn, and there goes my theory that ker Capt. CJ was awake and walking in jump, when all of a sudden this space-time bubble went *pop!* and she somehow brought forth books which sprang from her forehead fully formed, something like Athena, only without that chilly bronze form-fitting breastplate and skimpy Amazonian costume. Oh well!
Family crises, or personal crises, can have a way of making some months/years sort of blur together in an inexact mish-mash.
About the 500,000? It could be that that web counter has an upper limit, which, when tripped, causes it to Phase and quietly imagine itself as an old adding machine. Or perhaps even a Babbage Engine. Just pat the web counter on the back sympathetically, check its variables, and offer it some silicon broth.
Going way out on a limb of the most tenuously shaky metaphors to tie both together… Oh, never mind, I’ll say it just because it’s funny.
Conan the Barbarian has a loincloth. Terminator T-1000 doesn’t. Ah, progress! You just never know….
:grins:
I’d guesstimate you passed 500K visitors long ago.
I wonder what DARPA thinks about when the web was invented. I’ve known people who worked in DARPA and they said it was earlier than 1990. It just wasn’t that well-known to us plebians. It was kludgy, very hard to use, since everything was command line protocol (GUI? What’s that? I don’t want anything gooey in my computer!)
I listened to guys who were surfing in the early 90s, quite different from now, and even when I finally broke down and opened an account, it was still somewhat klunky. That was when we had the 2400 baud modem, then graduated to the 14.4 Kbaud, and finally up to the 56 KBits. When I split with my wife, we were still on the dial-up, but when I got my apartment, I set up a DSL account. What a difference.
Al Gore, you had nothing to do with the internet.
Yes, the internet was used back in the 1980s. My dad used it in academics, but nerds back then were using it for fun too. It wasn’t a visual medium like it is now, but still very interactive as far as communication goes. Check out the history of usenet. Very cool stuff.
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
More proof you should watch what you say on the internet. That dirt will keep turning up for years. Nothing you can do about it.
I remember one documentary which talked about the early development of things like the mouse, graphical user interfaces, hypertext, web pages, and the internet. Apparently, back in the late 50’s and early 60’s was when the first mouse was invented, and some time during the 60’s or 70’s was the first inkling of hypertext links, having a way for some item of information to link to another, so that people could follow them. Things like email and hypertext and an early form of the internet grew out of both defense and academic research through DARPA, while the mouse and GUI’s waited until XEROX PARC. (The Macintosh, Atari, Commodore, Amiga, and Windows all borrowed (reverse-engineered to duplicate) that research. Modern email and hypertext / web pages began to be talked about in computer science circles, also in the 80’s, and it was from the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s when things essentially all came together. Yes, Mosaic from Netscape was the first web browser with hypertext web pages and (gasp!) images, pictures.
It was right around 1997 or 1998 when I first began teaching myself about HTML and the first CSS. Hah, how things have changed! Yet how much hasn’t changed. It’s only now that something called CSS3 and SVG are beginning to enter usage, or at least test usage. Those, plus HTML5, are going to offer some really long-awaited abilities for designers, especially graphic designers and traditional print-media designers, and yes, there will be benefits for ebooks and other “emerging multimedia.”
However — The CSS3 and SVG standards have been on the drawing boards in committee for years now, along with the new HTML5, as well as things like SVG for scalable vector graphics, and MathML for better mathematical / scientific equation representation and typesetting. That means that we still don’t have those in their final, full recommendation forms as approved standards, and longer still until all those are implemented by browser makers, whether open standards-compliant, like Firefox and Safari, or proprietary (our way or bust!) like Microsoft.
It’s looking bright for the future, though. Good things are coming. It looks like even web fonts and threaded columnar grids (such as in newspapers and magazines) are finally coming in the next few months or couple of years. Hurray!
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I fervently wish I knew PHP. That’s on my To Do list.
I’m struggling with unlearning old vector graphics habits from Freehand and relearning new Illustrator’s interface, which in many places, seems just plain counter-intuitive, either to my artistic creative side or to my technically minded side. It really says something, IMHO, when I, as a trained user for many years of Freehand and other programs, can’t find or have to hunt and hunt, for how to do something without a manual or tutorial. (My brain is being especially and unaccountably resistant to change in this. Very annoying to me.)
Ditto on the PHP. I tried Joomla! You’ll note I’m over here at WordPress! 😆
I remember a display on New Computers, and there was a mouse demo on the counter. Nobody had seen a mouse, but after a little experimentation, to a man, everybody in the aisle of the convention agreed it was a lot easier to use if you flipped it over and just used the ball with your fingers. Can you say ‘trackball’?
I think I was using a 300 baud connection. “Hello” took a week. Nobody dared send anything long—that was cause for war!
BUT OUR COUNTER IS BACK!!!!! IT JUST WOKE UP!!!!!
joekc6nlx, the history of the web is pretty well documented and definitely wasn’t implemented until 1990-1991. Of course the internet exists from way before, since around 1970, when it was called ARPANET and restricted to a few nodes. But if anyone, on DARPA or elsewhere, says that they were surfing the web in the 80s, they are mistaken.
My fave site from grad school (1993-1996) is still here!
http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/
Talking about the early days of the internet and personal computers brings to mind the PBS series by Robert X. Cringley called ‘Triumph of the Nerds’.
It’s highly entertaining and a must-see for anyone interested in the early days of personal computers.
It features many amusing and fascinating interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, etc. – and with the people who knew them when they were working out of garages, or unknown nerds sitting up all night writing code.
A financier tells how Steve Jobs came in one day to get a loan to start Apple – with long hair and wearing sandals. (He was so persuasive that he got the loan.)
But the guy who made the first ever commercial personal computer never made any money out of it, and retrained as a medical doctor.
Someone from IBM tells how he went to visit a little company nobody had ever heard of, called Microsoft. He was greeted in the lobby by a fresh-faced young guy he assumed was the office boy – who turned out to be Bill Gates.
Then there’s the whole story of how Bill Gates agreed to provide an operating system for the first IBM PC, even though he didn’t have anything suitable, and there was no time to write anything. He went out and bought something called 86-DOS from the authors for $50,000 cash down (which they thought was a high price), rebranded it as MS-DOS and proceeded to make umpteen millions from it.
Steve Jobs tells the story of how he visited Xerox and saw a mouse and graphical interface for the first time. Xerox thought it was an interesting little toy, but a light went on in Steve’s head.
Then there’s the story about how Steve Jobs hired a PepsiCo executive who then proceeded to kick Steve out of Apple.
Steve Wozniak, the technical guy who actually designed and built the first Apple, and was Steve Jobs’ original partner (and an all-round nice guy), left Apple and did all the things he really wanted to do, like going back to college to finish his degree, and becoming a fifth-grade teacher.
There’s a lot more… and it’s all presented by Robert X. Cringley who knew Steve Jobs and many of the others from the beginning.
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Nerds-Bob-Cringely/dp/B00006FXQO
Cringley also did another PBS series ‘Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet’
The best way to learn PHP:
First, get PHP running on your own computer – it’s much more convenient than using a remote server.
Download XAMPP Portable. It’s free and contains a pre-configured setup of Apache server, PHP, MySQL, and a lot more. It’s portable, so no install, just unzip and run it. No fiddling with settings. You can have PHP and MySQL up and running on your own computer in a few minutes.
http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp
NB: This means you can install WordPress on your own computer and play around with it there, before you make changes to your live site.
Download a good text editor like Notepad++ which has syntax highlighting for PHP.
Work through a PHP tutorial. There are many available (just Google ‘PHP tutorial’). PHP 101 on the Zend site looks quite good.
The PHP reference manuals are all online at php.net
Good luck!
Thanks! That’s now on my to-do—
5 November – Off topic – Happy first day of Deepavali (also variously spelled Divali or Diwali), known as the festival of lights Diwali is an important five-day festival in Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism occurring between mid-October and mid-November. It is generally seen as a festival of the triumph of good over evil, and is celebrated with flowers and rows of lamps.
I can get behind that holiday~ I like candles and flowers!