Yes, that’s right! Five years ago my domain was carved in stone on the mountain of crap that is the net. I had naturally been online long before. At the age of eight or nine we had computers in the classroom, where you could play Python (referred to as ‘Snake’ by the younger generation) from a 5 inch floppy in lovely 8-bit graphics. Age twelve I signed up for the first "computer class" in school, which was more about getting to know some of the early Windooze software like Wordpad (if that was the correct name) and Paint. I produced many wonderful pieces of art, like this one:
It’s a metaphor for the rise of the agricultural sector which I thought would be the salvation of a failing democracy at the time. Ah.. kids!
Anyway. A short year after entering the teens, I got my first lessons on how to build a webpage in Frontpage. I don’t remember what version of the app it was, but I built a brilliant site for my online identity, viz. Rodian Ranger (later known as Rodian54). It was black, had several animated gifs and a wallpaper with lots of fire.
But Frontpage didn’t satisfy my craving for raw code, so when I got my hands on a short leaflet on how to build a webpage in ten easy steps my future was set. The homepage of Rodian Ranger and Rodian54 soon developed into Area54 Warez. These days were the good old days, when webservers of full version applications and pornographic images flooded port 80 and 21. 0-day ftps and Warez for Shares, etc. All I had to do was to get my foot in the door, steal the linkses and put them all on my site for free, no banners or popups. At any given time I had 60 working full version games on that site, plenty of traffic, and I never got caught.
WhiteBuddha (ca. 2001)
I had my period of making pre-sampled tracker music using lame software like eJay and putting it online under the artist name WhiteBuddha.
I made one album, and sold a single copy. Guess who bought it? Unfortunately, mp3.com eventually sold out, taking all my 20 something tunes with them including smash hits such as Dancing Samurais, Fiesto, Phreak on Phree and Doomed to walk the day on a rainy night. Recently I have been able to track down a few of those tunes, which will be made available as soon as I have Dance eJay 2 installed. I had an online radio station called Electronic Realization Radio Broadcast (ERRB), and I "signed" with the online label PremiereRecords.com along with some pretty damn good musicians.
Crescent (1999-2003)
In 1999 me and a couple of friends created a grunge band called Crescent (wrongly pronounced ‘kres-kent’). It became my first, large internet assignment and without knowing it I had consequently entered the blogosphere with regular updates and thoughts, long before the blog-term was invented. The first post was made in the year 2000. The webpage is still up and running:
We recorded two studio albums (and two "unofficial" ones) which I will make available on mp3 when I get the time. We had at least five fans back then.
Kids In the Morgue a.k.a KIM (2002)
I also made a page for my punk-jazz band (with mp3s):
For a long time sigg3.net was updated by flatfile only (text or html), and you can still find my newsfile.txt from 2002. However I was mostly putting my effort into longer entries on my online diary, but I eventually succumbed to blogger in 2003. I didn’t join the b2 community before July the same year on Friday, July 4th 2003, but that was mostly because a friend of mine was in the process of translating it to Norwegian. Blogger.com was also bogged down by traffic at the time, and could be down for two-three days in a row.
Good News (2003)
Good News was a weblog I co-wrote with Pauly and Kornelius at the time. It was supposed to feature small snippets of good news, big and small. I didn’t know at the time that Good News also was a synonym for the New Testament.. It eventually died out, but a taste is still available at arhive.org: www.Good-News.tk (archived)
The year 2002 and onwards saw many changes to the overall file-tree of the server and index page design. Here they are in order of appearance:
Sigg3’s Keep lo-fi version (Sep 30, 2002)
news at sigg3.net (Dec 16, 2002)
news at sigg3.net II (Jun 12, 2003)
Life Between Stations (Sep 20, 2003)
..and ultimately the design you all know..
Just another weblog (Jan 5, 2004)
..which is going to change when I get my finger out. All of the above is only a taste of my on- and offline activities, but since most of them had the life span of water on sand I just included the biggies. I’ve also had a few clients, believe it or not, but I am too ashamed to talk about my career as a webdesigner.
It has been a great five years, blogging on everything from my hangovers to — my next hangovers. For years the most popular search strings have included History of the Word Fuck, t.A.T.u and Princess Leia. Not strange when I host that history, a picture of Leia and write stuff like this about t.A.T.u:
Lesbian pop duo Tatu have revealed they have sex with each other THREE times a day. Russian chart sensations Julia Volkova and Lena Katina, both 18, say they like to make love in the morning, at lunchtime and last thing at night. And they say they regularly enjoy group sessions with sexy female fans after gigs.
Love at lunch? Sounded too good to be true. And it was.
I’ve been hacked, defaced and DDoS’ed both by mass-defacers and angry spammers targeting the site because of my anti-spam policies and pictures, and hosting spam aversion hacks for the b2 blogging tool. I’ve long been the home of b2 Cafelog Resource Center where I try to keep most of the b2 hacks, along with every official release I’ve got my hands on. Let me seize this opportunity to thank all of those who’ve helped me out in times of need, including Cyberian75, Michel V and Stevem and all the forum members I’ve met through the years.
My most favoured feature was Female of the Year:
It was a joy to see the traffic boost and different smearing campaigns, but it came down to so much work in the end that I eventually closed it down.
..Definitely? Nothing is certain. You decide.
Thanks to everyone who participated, nominated, voted and made life interesting those last weeks before Christmas. Also a big thanks to those of you who’ve bothered to do the bi-Weekly Poll and last but not least all of those who offered their insight, opinions or a simple "Your website is the most self-righteous piece of crap I have ever seen" throught the comments. I love the feedback, I love the e-mails, I love the attention. And you can never anticipate what to expect, as in the case of my most commented post to date which turned into a freestyle battle.
From over a hundred commenters, here are the Top 10 rambling lunatics:
- Sigg3 (+445)
- Michael (+119)
- koew (+111)
- kornelius (+103)
- IBloon (+77)
- MiB (+45)
- Pauly (+23)
- Jaime (+14)
- ivar (+13)
- fredrik (+11)
It has been a great five years doing this website, and I don’t exaggurate when I say that I always think of how I can improve it, change it, what I can add to it and hey! That would look great on my weblog!
A website is nothing without its visitors, user participation, feedback and, let’s not forget; its allies. Google reports that 35% of my traffic since 2006 originates from direct referrals from other sites. Since 2003 I’ve been published regularly on Pauly’s Truckin’ e-zine, I’ve had plenty of referrals from several highly esteemed weblogs such as Tao of Pauly, AlCantHang, The Daily Bloon, my younger brother Koew, my cousin Kekepower, Jamie and ScaryDuck to name but a few. My cousin has also given me the storage capacity to fill this page with sordid images of old people in the woods, the most scariestest pictures of the day — including one very happy wombat — and all the crap I couldn’t fit on my small enavn web hotel.
Oh yes, I must also give thanks to the guys at enavn who, despite my own and several hackers’ best efforts, have not given in to the nagging desire to completely pull the plug of this site when times were hard. They have saved months of work for me. And thanks to all of you who never bothered to sue me, but kept it in the comments, hate-mail and submissions to somethingawful.com. I couldn’t have done it without you. But I did. Let’s face it: I am excellent. To another five years!
Another five years of moping around, sexist remarks, bda gramar, self-righteous and self-indulgent snippets of literature, weak political analysis, crazy dreams n’ naked ladies, free beer, tapirs, dodgy love affairs, penguins, linkses and laughter. Have a nice celebration! Oh, and I declare peace unto the world. See you around sigg3.net.
Grats. Epic post ‘n win! I still love the “news at sigg3.net II”-design. Just another day at the beach, eh?
I do believe that there might be some Rodian54-stuff on some floppys living somewhere in mom’s flat. I still remember the good ol’ times on the Internet. Oh the days…
I’m going out for a drink now, I’ll drink one fer ye! Cheers! (Oh, and the wombat can come too)
Congrats on five years!!
That was an excellent post! Haha, I almost lost my coffee on my screen. You know what keeps me coming back to you site? I think it’s a perfect blend of obnoxious arrogance and abject humility… and comedy and the best written rambles that I’ve ever read.
Here’s to another 5 years at least. Keep being yourself, we love you the way you are.
Oh, and that fucking lumberjack meme of yours… that is just too funny. Priceless. You see? You’re this Norwegian computer geek (affectionately), but BAM! you’re also this axe-swingin’ manly man, stomping through the forest biting the heads off of small woodland creatures. arrrrgggh!
Hehe, I always picture it with the word balloon, “You want some o’ this?”
And there’s the duality again. Tough guy, don’t mess with me, men, or I’ll bust you up, but then, ladies, you want some of this?
See it works both ways, and that’s your blog. Works both ways.
Anyway, keep it up.
Thanks for coming back here!
This would be so boring without you.. And reasonably pointless too:)
YEA! Grats man! Skole (right?) to your last 5 years, and here’s to the next 5, or 10… Till you die of alcohol poisoning. ;)
‘Neways, nice informative post and *coughgoodplugcough* nice pics. Now… Back to what I was doing before your post… Beer.
happy 5 years :)
cheers
Congrats!!! It’s late, but it’s better than never! :P
BTW, I started with BASIC in high school, but I learned most of back-end stuffs from my first job in college.
Cool, Mike. We didn’t have any qualified personnel in the North those days. At least not in the public schools. Today, the Norwegian Google team is settled in the North like many other IT companies. The change came when people realized they could work just about anywhere with IT.
– Secret bunker outside of Tromsø? Why the heck not?!
Down here in Oslo however.. A friend of mine in his thirties learned assembly as a kid from his own mother.
From his mother??? Daaaaaaaaaamn!