Alan has been keeping an online diary on Geocities since 1998. (He claims to have started one year later, apparently doesn’t remember his page14.htm.) In 2007 he had this insight:

I have been keeping a diary here since 1999. In those days I was perhaps a bit ahead of my time. Now I am behind the times. Basically this is a blog and I should recognise the fact and use a proper blog page. So I am taking a break here whilst I start a blog, but might well return to this site in due course. After all it has been home for 8 years. The new blog can be found at

http://alansalmanac.blogspot.com

Let’s see how that goes. You are welcome to go over and read it.

Of course he never returned. Well, his new blog seems okay sort of. It gets updated, it has photos – and it lacks the intimacy of the old site’s hand crafted HTML. Indeed it was basic and for sure looked very much like many other self-made pages. But there is still a difference between looking very much like something else and looking exactly like thousands of others using the same blogspot.com template.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Village/6682/2007Diary02.htm