The first post

This is my 500th post.
The funny thing is that I was trolling through some old material on a storage drive. I used to have a domain name called 'TravellingCompanion.com', something told me back in 1989 that travel would be an important segment on the web.

It sat unused for a while (I had loads of domains including WombService - for first time mums and GoodGrief a portal into the after-life...cradle to grave).

Conversations with my mate Steve Garton convinced me that I should come up to visit him in Hong Kong. The web was going off there. The wealthiest man in in HK was about to float TOM.com on the stock exchange. It had no business model, no purpose or evident way of generating money but Hong Kong was ablaze with excitement. Given that the principal player was fabulously wealthy ordinary folk seemed to believe that some of the good fortune would rub off on them.

I imagine it would be a good idea to make a record of my trip for my (then) wife to be able to read every day. I had a digital camera (a lowly 3 megabyte camera that was considered 'pro-sumer' in it's day). I also had a laptop - a G3 Powerbook - once again 'state of the art' at the time and a doorstop today. I was making websites using a programme called NetObjects Fusion. So all the pieces fell into place. it was all very web 1.0. Just figuring out how to make a connection to the web from Hong Kong was something of a mission, but I figured it out.

I've posted the pages - it's just a week's worth. The photos are tiny because everyone had 56k modems in 2000.

The thing that strikes me is that TravellingCompanion.com was, effectively, a blog.
Others were undoubtedly doing it too. But I'm going adorn myself with early adopter laurels.

My favourite of the seven days of posting was 'What's wrong with Iowa?'. I've left the design and content untouched as an artefact (I didn't know how to do css at the time - and little else for that matter).

Travelling Companion