Tag Archives: Sausalito

A fun story about the early Web

I had a short thing come out for a fun project called WebSafe2K16, about the early World Wide Web, which just turned 25 this year. 216 essays of 216 words each. Mine is here:

FIVE STARS (#99CC00)

The title, Five Stars, refers to the rating system we used for the Magellan Web directory. At one point, we actually gave out badges to sites that “earned” five stars; if you remember Point Communications, our graphic copied their “best of the Web” self-advertisement.

I chose the color because that was the color of the icons and packaging of Macromedia Dreamweaver software, used for creating Web pages—more precisely, it’s the color of the covers of the books I wrote about using this software, back when I cared about knowing tech things and back when you had to know how to make a web page in order to make a web page.

*whispers* Web pages were better when they were mostly text