I’ve used the Internet for about 10 years and I’ve had a website for about 8. I’m sure many of my memories are similar to other webmasters.

I decided to share some of the most interesting, and most embarrasing, memories of web ‘design’ and general use of the web which I have.

I think it demonstrates the progress I, and webmasters in general, have made that we’ve stopped some of these barbaric practices.

• Remember when you used a WYSIWYG editor? I used one called firstSite, which you can’t even buy on Amazon marketplace today. It was pretty user friendly though, having simple FTP as well as more complex facilities such as the ability to insert applets! Eventually, I progressed onto Dreamweaver and finally onto dynamic CMSes which didn’t even require an editor!
• Remember when you used your ISP’s free web hosting? I used NTL’s for quite a few years but I eventually needed more webspace and the ability to use PHP etc.
• Remember when you searched for free hosting, after you stopped using your ISP’s? I did, and I remember the number of ads I got. On the whole part, these free webhosts were pretty unreliable with the exception of Bravehost, who unfortunately filled my sites with lots of adverts.
• Remember when you used to have a guestbook? I had one which was always full of lots of spammy compliments which I naïvely believed!
• Remember when you tried to make a form for the first time? I do, and I remember wondering why it didn’t work. If only I realised I needed formmail, and a button why simply said ’submit’ wouldn’t do unless I made it POST.
• Remember when, after giving up making your own form, you turned to a site like Bravenet? I do. I remember using Bravenet for everything from site search to polls to guestbooks. The amazing thing is that Bravenet are still about, but now they call these ‘widgets’. How very 2 point oh of them.
• Remember when you used to use Blogger? Perhaps not, if you’re a blogger who started on WordPress.com, but I remember Blogger. Amazingly, it was probably much more flexible than WordPress.com but even self-hosted Blogger didn’t compare in flexibility to self-hosted WordPress. In all honesty, a CMS with pretty much no support for anything dynamic is bound to fail. I remember detesting Blogger’s comment system, as it had no Gravatar or TrackBack support, so I had to turn to HaloScan. Poor Azhar still uses it.
• Remember MovableType?
• Remember your first comment? Honestly, I can’t and my comments were lost in my MovableType to WordPress switch
• Remember when TLA worked? Before nasty Google started to penalise?
• Remember using blogging traffic exchanges, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion? A bit embarrasing, I know, but I came across Azhar, Paul, Danette and Sarah there… so it isn’t all bad! In all honestly, traffic exchanges gave me the initial readers I needed.
• Remember when some of the top blogs around were members of 9rules? Remember when Mashable, Rev2 and Paul Stamatiou were?
• Remember Solution Watch, which at one point was one of the most prestigious Web 2.0 blogs online?
• Remember when you used a desktop blogging client? For some reason, I thought it would be wise to do this until only a few months ago. Looks like I wasted $20 on ecto.
• Remember when you tried to get OS X running on your PC… back when Macs were PowerPC based.
• Remember before OS X existed and it could be argued that Macs were inferior to PCs?

Please excuse this awfully punctuated post, but if you have any similar memories feel free to add them to the comments.