BLOG. That word didn't exist until December of 1999. It really sucks that I've slacked off so much. Some folks don't believe me when I say I was blogging before that word even existed. What's incredible is being away from my websites for so long, only to come back and see some of the old school small sites have become giants.
I recall some random webmasters contacting me and asking me very basic questions about HTML code and other minor programming questions. Some of these webmasters are now multi millionaires and are CEO's of the biggest websites on the net. In 2002 I remember emailing Chad Hurley back and forth about all kinds of programming crap. For those of you who don't know him, he created YouTube from his garage. I've been to that garage. I recall how shocked I was to see the operation before it launched. It was a geeks dream garage with CRT monitors everywhere.
Anyways, I guess the point is to take advantage of every chance you get. I think I had a few missed opportunities back in the day. Frankly, I got lazy and burned out. I pretty much sat in the same chair for 7 years. Updating every single day. Building new sites and creating interactive communities before you ever heard of facebook, myspace and any other website. Finally I just couldn't do it anymore. From lack of motivation, to frustration with other websites trying to take you down. It was a never ending battle. So I threw my hands up in the air and gave up.
Although I have a lot of regrets, I'm very glad I never caved into the competition. I chose to leave my sites online, though unmanaged, but still online. I turned down hundreds of offers to buy me out. Offers for partnership and offers to manage my websites. Obviously being self employed for 7 years tell you that money was a real motivator. However, I have a sentimental attachment to my network of sites. I can't let go of any of them. Well, that's not completely true. I did sell a 6 websites in 2004. But those were not websites that I built. Those were sites that I paid a designer to build and purchased content for. I hated to see them go, but it wasn't my work.. All my original sites are hand build/coded by me. I can't imagine selling any of them for any amount after the years of commitment to them.
Let me tell you who I am most loyal to and who is also the reason why the sites are still online. It's the folks over at the Bad Ass Forum. Sure, they are here much less frequently, but they never forget me. They always check in with me, email me and post updates about themselves and others on the forum. These are the same folks that got me out of a jam in 2003. My traffic increased so much that I couldn't afford to keep the servers online. Back in the day, bandwidth was incredibly expensive. Not everyone could have a website that saw 200,000 unique hits a day. Especially since I hosted more videos than any other website online. Literally. Anyway the members of the forum decided to donate. I never asked for a penny from them. They did this on their own. They donated enough for me to buy a new server and keep the websites online. I will never forget that and for them I am grateful.
My last real involvement with my sites was back in 2005. Sure you will see some posts after that, but nothing serious. Recently I have been checking on my sites more often and just seeing how they slowly started to fade away. Traffic is down drastically. It really grinds my gears but it's all my fault. I really miss the old days and I was doing very well. For the past week I've upgrading the servers and fixing all my old sites that have been neglected in an attempt to bring some of them back to life. I'm going to try and spend more time online, whenever I have time of course.
I have a sense of pride in keeping the sites afloat. Especially when I look for sites that were doing well back in the day, and now they're gone. Some of them spent more time than I did online. So I guess I haven't completely given up. I don't know what the chances of getting even close to the following I had early in this decade. But I hope to at least get my Bad Ass Forum member back together like they used to be. Look for me. I'm coming back.
