Yes, that's right! Five years ago my domain was carved in stone on the mountain of crap that is the net. I had naturally been online long before. At the age of eight or nine we had computers in the classroom, where you could play Python (referred to as 'Snake' by the younger generation) from a 5 inch floppy in lovely 8-bit graphics. Age twelve I signed up for the first "computer class" in school, which was more about getting to know some of the early Windooze software like Wordpad (if that was the correct name) and Paint. I produced many wonderful pieces of art, like this one:
It's a metaphor for the rise of the agricultural sector which I thought would be the salvation of a failing democracy at the time. Ah.. kids!
Anyway. A short year after entering the teens, I got my first lessons on how to build a webpage in Frontpage. I don't remember what version of the app it was, but I built a brilliant site for my online identity, viz. Rodian Ranger (later known as Rodian54). It was black, had several animated gifs and a wallpaper with lots of fire.
But Frontpage didn't satisfy my craving for raw code, so when I got my hands on a short leaflet on how to build a webpage in ten easy steps my future was set. The homepage of Rodian Ranger and Rodian54 soon developed into Area54 Warez. These days were the good old days, when webservers of full version applications and pornographic images flooded port 80 and 21. 0-day ftps and Warez for Shares, etc. All I had to do was to get my foot in the door, steal the linkses and put them all on my site for free, no banners or popups. At any given time I had 60 working full version games on that site, plenty of traffic, and I never got caught.
WhiteBuddha (ca. 2001)
I had my period of making pre-sampled tracker music using lame software like eJay and putting it online under the artist name WhiteBuddha.
I made one album, and sold a single copy. Guess who bought it? Unfortunately, mp3.com eventually sold out, taking all my 20 something tunes with them including smash hits such as Dancing Samurais, Fiesto, Phreak on Phree and Doomed to walk the day on a rainy night. Recently I have been able to track down a few of those tunes, which will be made available as soon as I have Dance eJay 2 installed. I had an online radio station called Electronic Realization Radio Broadcast (ERRB), and I "signed" with the online label PremiereRecords.com along with some pretty damn good musicians.
Crescent (1999-2003)
In 1999 me and a couple of friends created a grunge band called Crescent (wrongly pronounced 'kres-kent'). It became my first, large internet assignment and without knowing it I had consequently entered the blogosphere with regular updates and thoughts, long before the blog-term was invented. The first post was made in the year 2000. The webpage is still up and running:
We recorded two studio albums (and two "unofficial" ones) which I will make available on mp3 when I get the time. We had at least five fans back then.
Kids In the Morgue a.k.a KIM (2002)
I also made a page for my punk-jazz band (with mp3s):
For a long time sigg3.net was updated by flatfile only (text or html), and you can still find my newsfile.txt from 2002. However I was mostly putting my effort into longer entries on my online diary, but I eventually succumbed to blogger in 2003. I didn't join the b2 community before July the same year on Friday, July 4th 2003, but that was mostly because a friend of mine was in the process of translating it to Norwegian. Blogger.com was also bogged down by traffic at the time, and could be down for two-three days in a row.
Good News (2003)
Good News was a weblog I co-wrote with Pauly and Kornelius at the time. It was supposed to feature small snippets of good news, big and small. I didn't know at the time that Good News also was a synonym for the New Testament.. It eventually died out, but a taste is still available at arhive.org: www.Good-News.tk (archived)
The year 2002 and onwards saw many changes to the overall file-tree of the server and index page design. Here they are in order of appearance:
Sigg3's Keep lo-fi version (Sep 30, 2002)
news at sigg3.net (Dec 16, 2002)
news at sigg3.net II (Jun 12, 2003)
Life Between Stations (Sep 20, 2003)
..and ultimately the design you all know..
Just another weblog (Jan 5, 2004)
..which is going to change when I get my finger out. All of the above is only a taste of my on- and offline activities, but since most of them had the life span of water on sand I just included the biggies. I've also had a few clients, believe it or not, but I am too ashamed to talk about my career as a webdesigner.
It has been a great five years, blogging on everything from my hangovers to -- my next hangovers. For years the most popular search strings have included History of the Word Fuck, t.A.T.u and Princess Leia. Not strange when I host that history, a picture of Leia and write stuff like this about t.A.T.u:
