The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

It was 20 years ago today

On 13 May 1998, just past midnight New York time, I posted my first joke on my brand-new braverman.org website from my apartment in Brooklyn.

My first website of any kind was a page of links I maintained for myself starting in April 1997. Throughout 1997 and into 1998 I gradually experimented with Active Server Pages, the new hotness, and built out some rudimentary weather features. That site launched on 19 August 1997.

By early April 1998, I had a news feed, photos, and some other features. On April 2nd, I reserved the domain name braverman.org. Then on May 6th, I launched a redesign that filled out our giant 1024 x 768 CRT displays. Here's what it looked like; please don't vomit:

On May 13th, 20 years ago today, I added a Jokes section. That's when I started posting things for the general public, not just for myself, which made the site a proto-blog. That's the milestone this post is commemorating.

Shortly after that, I changed the name to "The Write Site," which lasted until early 2000.

In 1999, Katie Toner redesigned the site. The earliest Wayback Machine image shows how it looked after that. Except for the screenshot above, I have no records of how the site looked prior to Katie's redesign, and no easy way of recreating it from old source code.

I didn't call it a "blog" until November 2005. But on the original braverman.org site, I posted jokes, thoughts, news, my aviation log, and other bits of debris somewhat regularly. What else was it, really?

Today, The Daily Parker has 6,209 posts in dozens of categories. Will it go 20 more years? It might. Stick around.

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