Daily Cait: First entry, May 22nd 1998

Note: this is an archive of my first 'blog', which I thought of then as a web diary. I have begun the process of transferring the contents in to my current blog database so that the entries are protected, but the original blog can also be found at this address: Daily Cait.

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I still have trouble remembering that it's 1998. My instinct is to write... well, any random year number from 1986 on, typically.

So yes. It's a diary. Sorry I'm not being more original. The rest of the site is boring from today... onward? I just wanted to get the thing up - to 'make my mark' on the world I have come to know and love. You may as well check here if you can be bothered and as and when I update things, I'll let you know. Today, there is only a friends page and the personal homepage. I haven't got the CV together, because I have to translate all my articles from old Mac discs. I'll take a photo of my baby Mac one day - it's the cutest - an old Performa. A very old Performa. A hugely famous sit-com was written on it once, before it was passed on to me for the lowly price of a bottle of Champagne. I may tell you about that some time. Well, obviously I will.

It occurs to me immediately that for the first time, the creation of a diary using the word "you" constantly suddenly makes sense. Perhaps a millennia of diary writers were waiting for this moment in history.

So - the reason. Well, meeting this man made me less afraid of being myself, and made me proud that a world exists where harmless ego-mania and brazen insecurity are deemed to be not only acceptable, but strangely entertaining. I've always wanted to do this, but I didn't have enough confidence in my abilities to make reasonable looking pages. Well, now, I have skills, I have my Homesite and well, it's more of the usual. I'm also obviously an egomaniac. But that's hardly original, is it?

There are no frames because I have an absolute hatred of the bloody things. The world has too many left hand menus. I'm looking in to alternative navigational structures, but at the moment, this loose comfortable framework suits me. I've handily compartmentalised my life in to noun-centred directories to make things easier for you to create a personal profile of me, and you can even mail me if you want. If you want an instant reply, forget it.

What else - I won't be updating at weekends, and don't expect an every day change. Or to see "Cait naked" anywhere - you'll be damn lucky - I save that for my special friends.

By the way, I might not stick with white - it feels a bit 'early 97'. However, I have no idea what a suitable alternative is, without filling this whole damn thing full of a load of dross. Clean and serene is ok up to a point I suppose.

By the way, if you subscribe to here, you'll probably love this… but, I'm not saying "Scandal city". Merely that I obviously work there. Hence the short earl.

More whenever.

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Editor's note re links:

http://www.freedonia.com/~carl

This was the somewhat esoteric blog of Carl Steadman, one of the original web celebrities. I have no idea how I met him, but I used to read "Suck" *religiously* in those days. Carl was oficiously smart, in a slightly sneering way, and who loved to take refuge in his fucked-upness. I am different to you, don't you see? I felt quite sorry for him, and put up with his nonsense to make sure he was alright, in as much as I could from across the Atlantic.

Homesite was a *really good* HTML editor sold by Allaire, who were bought by... Adobe? I cannot overstate how great it was. It was actually a bastardised version of the tool they made to support coding in "Cold Fusion", their proprietry web building software which made things like building forms really easy! Allaire had a name which was easy to take the piss out of using a posh English accent.

I had a single name Virgin Net email address back in the days when we felt proud when we had a single name email addresses (cait@). It meant we were the first, you see. I haven't bothered linking that!

Not sure why I linked to Virgin Net - perhaps because I expected to be posting all sorts of dodgy insider info. Unlikely anyone would have been interested.

Note also that I said "earl" at the end there. That's mortifying. There was a fashion for saying "earl" for URL, and obviously I thought it was 'cool' to write that down! (Slaps head).