Ten Years Old

Happy tenth birthday, Upbeat and Downstairs!

This site, in some form or another, was vaulted onto the World Wide Web ten years ago today. Originally started as a small site for links and musings, the site has gone through several iterations and ballooned many times larger in terms of size and content.

In 1996, I’d be lucky if I saw one hit per day that wasn’t me checking out my creation. Now, as of yesterday’s logs, this site receives about 7,000 hits daily and recorded roughly 2.4 million hits last year. Sure, it’s no Yahoo (106 million visitors) or Google (94 million visitors), but I’m pretty happy with it. (Yes, I know a “hit” is not a “visitor”, so it could just be me visiting my page 7,000 times a day. Ha!)

In trying to recall what the Web was like ten years ago, I came across a web site appropriately named “Internet ’96”. On the site, the author takes a look at how the front pages for several popular companies used to look in 1996. Some of them are quite entertaining, and I love the old-school White Castle page. Most companies would quickly fire their marketing firms if they launched anything like that now. But, hey, 80s clothing has come back, so maybe old site designs will, too?

As a matter of fact, I came across an internet archive that has a version of this site from early 1999. It’s … eclectic, to say the least.

What’s next for this site, you ask?

I really don’t know. This site has become a larger hobby than I imagined, and I’m not sure in which direction I’d like to take it. Even though I haven’t updated it as much as I’d like to, I’m not ready to hang it all up yet. Ten years has been a fun ride, and I’m interested to see where the next ten lead. I’d like to hear your comments below.