More than ten years ago I started dirtdirt.com. Remember this? Ten years. Wow. When I started it I was the only person I knew who had a web page. Both Livejournal and Blogger were still but profitable gleams in their parents' eyes. Well, Jake had put some personal projects on the web, but he didn't have a consistent page of his own. In fact, Jake had been working doing web stuff for a couple of years by that point. He got a job writing code at the hospital he was a parking lot manager at, and I have no idea how the process went. Anyway, I remember him telling me that the web was really the way to go, and that although HTML and such seemed like it was insanely complex, the gist of it was very graspable, and I should do myself the favor. I think Jake was probably concerned that I was going to graduate from art school a few years hence and I was going to move into his house and sleep on the clam chair until I reached retirement age. At any rate, he convinced me, and I misappropriated about $800 of student loan money* and bought a computer. Heather, my girlfriend at the time, and I set it up in the back bedroom of our apartment on Kenney Street. I remember turning it on and being completely flummoxed as to what to do. The last computer I had owned had been a freaking Commodore 64, I think. Heather had been doing temp office jobs and was an old pro. "The start** button, down there in the corner. That's where everything is." I didn't know how to write code, or use Photoshop, or any of that stuff. That stuff that I do for a living now, and have, with a few exceptions, since then. Anyway, at some point, I decided to try making some web pages. Like so many others my first few tries were on Geocities. Long since gone, but I did some fairly cool, rudimentary "Art" pages. I got the tiniest handle on HTML, at least enough to not being completely lost. Six months or so later I was part of an art exhibition with Heather and Antonio and Greg, and I wanted to put up a website. This was extremely controversial, but I was eventually able to convince them.*** We put it on Jake's webspace, and printed the URL on our flyers, and we were total vanguards. Of course, that website also is long gone. I guess maybe Jake has a copy of it on disc somehwere, because he is that kind of guy, but I haven't seen it in ten years. Don't even remember what it looked like. By 1998 I had graduated from college, Heather and I had split ways, and I was commuting to my job at a bookstore (long gone) in Boston and living in my parent's basement. Only it wasn't the basement, it was the attic. But I was fairly miserable. At some point I built what would become "Dreems". A while later I decided to buy a domain name and I was torn between dreems.com, and something else. I decided on dirtdirt.com****, because, who knew? Maybe I'd put up something other than Dreems eventually. I fired up the olde MasterCard and away I went. Anyway, as it turned out, Dreems.com was taken, and a screensaver company had a crappy site there. It's long gone, but I remain. It saddens me that I haven't kept up with Dirtdirt.com as much as I'd intended. I still work on it, sometimes a lot (see the advent calendar from last month. That thing was a lot of work. Fun, glad I did it, but a TON of work.), but it isn't as integrated into my life as it was. I keep thinking I'll start really diggin again, and at least posting something like once a week, but it's hard. Time is short, and when I look back at the many, many entries in the early days, I like some, and am annoyed by others, and since I have imposed a "no delete" rule***** my internal editor is a lot less forgiving, so things don't make it past the "Maybe I ought to write about that" stage. Also, the Twitters, Flickrs, Facebooks, and MetaFilters of the world operate many of the same muscles that dirtdirt.com used to. But still. Ten years. Still going.

Footnote note: I've been reading my friend Becky's blog, Becky Goes To London, and she uses footnotes quite charmingly, and I've been reinfected with the mania. * Speaking of student loans, another indicator that a lot of time has passed is that I just paid off the last of mine. I can't believe it. I mean, I also can't believe they loaned me the money ("Hmm, $30,000 to finish art school? No marketable skills? Lazy chump without the inclination to do much of anything at all but drink coffee and eat pancakes? You're the kind of credit risk we can get behind!"), but I really paid the whole damn thing off. Of course, Erin still has $50,000 to go, but well, you know. ** Windows 95. This was in late '96 or early '97? I wonder, sometimes, if I wouldn't have been better off getting a Mac. Zack was a Mac guy, and he lobbied for the Apple. I think had I gone that route I might have been better off in terms of graphic design stuff, and hipper, but I wouldn't have been as able to learn server stuff and coding, and I wouldn't have had to do as much problem solving, which although a giant terrifying pain in the ass, especially early on, definitely made me a better computer user, and a better developer. Funny but true. *** Can you imagine a time where it wouldn't be automatic that you would announce something like an art show on the web? We churned our own butter then, too, and a dinosaur ate my neighbor. ****My email address was dirtdirt@aol.com, an address I had decided upon more or less arbitrarily. I had gone through a stage of writing "Eat Dirt" on things, and so when presented with the "What do you want your handle to be" dialogue upon signing up for internet service, I tried "eatdirt" but it was taken. So I tried "dirtdirt", and it was accepted. I thought about it for about 5 seconds, "Uh, eateat? Dirtdirt? DirtEat? Dirtdirt. Ok, dirtdirt." I still like it, well enough, anyway, but it's sure funny that something so cavalierly arrived upon would now be so firmly tied up in my life. Accidental branding. ***** Because, as someone or other wise once told me, in art if you don't make any rules to follow you are just wanking it.