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Behind The Firm List Blog
5th Birthdays
My inattention to The Firm List made me miss the fact that the site turned 5 years old this
past month. 5 years. Man, I can't believe I've been running this site for so long.
I can still remember the basement level offices of Conduit back when I didn't have a computer at home, just having moved
to Boston, MA. I would stay late in order to work on my projects. This was a very productive period in my web publishing
history, at least if you measure in the number of sites I started.
As a general rule, I had been surfing the web, finding other web design firms from around the world. I would bookmark them
(I was using Netscape at that time) and finally one day the bottom of my list of bookmarks were greyed out and inaccessible.
After a little poking around, I realized I had hid some maximum number of bookmarks (like a 1,000 or something?)
So after a couple of attempts to find some solution, I decided to dump my bookmarks into a website of sorts and hence The
Firm List came to be.
While 5 years is a lot of time, at least in terms of the web, it's not as prehistoric as perhaps I am fully used to. Recently,
due to a request from a nice fellow, I decided to put my New Baby Name Index back online. I had let the domain expire, but
from it's first year or so of life when it was just a directory off of electricalsocket.com, I was still getting a lot of
traffic to the phantom site (from bookmarks and old search engine caches).
When I decided to put it back online, I decided to use the original design, from 1996, prior to the changes I made in order
to fit banner ads and other profit adventures on the site.
So I restored a site I created nearly 7 years ago, with a design last online perhaps 5-6 years ago, for a site which went offline
at least 1-2 years ago. Man, I've been doing this too long!
On a related note, a little while back, I decided to "redesign" electricalsocket.com. The design that was there had been in
place since the summer of 1997. I took that 1997 design and then replaced it with a design that I first came up with about
2-3 years ago but never used. Man, when your unused redesigns are older than many websites all together, you know you've
been at this for much too long.
