This blog is not my first website. Back in the day, when you had to write all the HTML for your web pages by hand, and we didn’t have any of these fancy shmancy web frameworks (is there a ‘Grandpa Simpson’ CSS property?), I had a meager presence on the World Wide Web. Just a few pages, tucked away on the lab group’s old-school NCSA httpd web server, which was one of the few easy ways for people to get their own space on the web (personal web hosting being pretty much unheard of at the time).
If you were around and remember anything about the Web in 1994, these pages were exactly the kind of cookie cutter abomination that just about every undergrad or grad student or professor or employee of some high-tech company with access to a web server threw up (sometimes literally, it seemed). A big bold title that included your name, followed by the obligatory thumbnail mugshot either from a scanned photo or a low-res digital camera, maybe a brief biography, maybe some additional photos of you with a pet or a significant other or something, maybe a list of publications. And, somewhere mixed in there, the inevitable section of “Cool links” or “My links” or “Things I Like” or whatever you wanted to call your personal manual link aggregation. Easily 80% of the web was like this at the time; cropped GIFs and a long list of links, most of which led to other people’s long lists of links.
Finally, one night, after surfing page after page of “cool links”, despairing of ever finding anything resembling new original content, a terrible, wonderful, thesis-procrastinating idea was conceived. And the next day, Mike’s World Wide Web of Barfbags was born. It wasn’t much to look at; we didn’t have JavaScript, we didn’t have CSS, we served our pages through 40 feet of snow, we ate rocks for breakfast and we liked it. But, for a brief shining moment, you could go somewhere on the web, see some ugly scanned-in barfbag photos, and read some sarcastic and (dare I say?) amusing text describing them that you couldn’t find anywhere else on the Web. It was one small thumb of the nose at unoriginality, a fart in a hurricane of circularly referential links, and then I got back to the thesis and more or less forgot about the barfbags. The whole episode was good for a laugh, and people would bring me barfbags when they flew (unused, always unused) as a joke, but I never really intended to add to or even maintain it after that initial burst of energy.
Now, of course, the Web is chock-full of original content (which may cause despair for altogether different reasons). Neglected, the barfbag page lingered on at the lab even after I left and took on a pseudo-life of its own, with people occasionally linking to it as recently as 2006. My favorite random link is this guy, who is clearly annoyed that my crappy page showed up prominently on Google. Alas, sometime in the last few months the lab finally put Mike’s World Wide Web of Barfbags out of its misery, ending its pathetic zombie existence, although the morbidly curious can still find it lurking on the Wayback Machine. I’m a little sad to see it gone; since I have some free time, perhaps I will be inspired to resurrect it in bold Web2.0 style. And, I will call it Barfbook.