Recently National Geographic Channel aired a fascinating docu-miniseries called “Valley of the Boom” which told the story of the early days of three internet companies: Netscape, TheGlobe.com and Pixelon. Given the fact that 1) I’m old and 2) the internet changed my life in the 1990s (it allowed me to meet my future husband), it has been a treat to relive those days via this miniseries, which was excellently and creatively produced. If you haven’t seen it, or don’t have access to the NatGeo channel, it is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
During one episode, the guys from TheGlobe.com made reference to their main competitor, GeoCities. The reference made laugh out loud (for real) because my very first blog was on Geocities back in 1998 or 1999. I went on the Geocities archive to see if I could find my site, but I honestly could not remember what it was called, so I had no luck.
But after searching for Geocities it reminded me that I could go on the Internet Archive and look up Cootiehog and remind myself of what it has looked like over the years. My oh my how it has changed!
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I’ve had this blog since April 2002. There have been times I’ve thought about getting rid of it, but still I hang on and continue to write. My readership peaked in 2005 when I was featured in a story on CNN about mommy bloggers. For the next year or so I was averaging 10,000 unique visitors a month. Sadly, I never capitalized on those visitors (hello, hindsight!).
In 2008 I signed up for Facebook and my blogging took a drastic dive – not only in content, but in visitors (of course). I think I get about 2K unique visitors a month and of those I GUARANTEE at least 25% are bots. But I’m still hanging on, and appreciating the non-bot organic traffic that I still get from time to time. So hello, non-bot organic visitors!
