I started blogging back in 2001. A curious claim, you might think, when the oh-so-imaginatively-titled ‘First Post!‘ on this site dates from April 2002.
Ah, but you see – before Quernstone.com, there was ItLikesYou, a community portal (we were still big on ‘portals’ back in 2001, remember?) where multiple authors could post quick comments about things they stumbled across, that they liked, and that they thought others might like too. Metafilter predated ILY by almost three years, but it was then (and still is now) a clearing-house for pointers to other websites – ILY was intended more for comments on the world beyond the web.
ILY failed, in that it only ever attracted a few dozen posts from a tiny handful of authors. None of us ever had the time to drive it forwards, and it was never anything other than ‘just another group weblog.’ We even failed in the ‘not so much a linksblog’ aim, and eventually, we all drifted away to our individual blogs. Fnally, in late 2003, a database upgrade on the webserver broke the site entirely.
Mysteriously, a further update in 2004 brought it at least partially back to life, though it was still impossible to access the admin functions. Somehow it was still possible to post comments, with the inevitable result that stinking bastard spammers found it, and recently bombarded it. Today I tried to update the software running the site, but two years is a long time in the life of a web application, and the update failed. I had no option but to put ILY out of its misery, and remove the site entirely.
I can’t help but feel a little sad about this, since it’s the first of my own websites that I’ve intentionally retired. But nobody was using it, and its time had passed. I don’t like deleting content, but at least the WayBack Machine has a mirror, so you can see what it looked like, and re-read Martin’s comments about ear candling.
On the bright side, I appear to have a domain name going spare. Anyone want to do anything with ‘ItLikesYou.com’? It’s paid-up through mid-2006.