Happy 20th Anniversary of the Movie Mom Website!

Twenty years ago this week, when there were only a few thousand websites and not one from a corporation or publication, I decided to publish movie reviews online from a parent’s point of view. In honor of that anniversary two of my ebooks will be free from today through Sunday. Check out 101 Must-See Movie Moments and 50 Must-See Movies: Weddings. I also have three hard copy versions of 101 Must-See Movie Moments to give away. Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with 20 in the subject line and tell me your favorite movie. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only) I’ll pick winners at random on July 26, 2015.
Enjoy!

In 1995, just about every site on the Web was put there by a college student or someone in the military or was part of a university’s in-house system for publishing notices of meetings and conferences and trading papers and data. I had been online since 1986, when it was just pre-Web bulletin boards and listservs. I was very interested in the technology, but I didn’t want to create a the typical “Here is a picture of my dog and my coffee pot and here are my ten favorite links” website. And I wanted to write movie reviews. So I decided to combine the two. I still remember that first URL: http://www.prodigy.com/rcpj55a/moviemom

It is hard to remember now how new and exotic and primitive the web was in those days. I did all my own code for the first four or five years, and was very proud of myself for figuring out how to post pictures of movie posters and embedded links. And I watched the Web grow up all around me. When I began, there was no Yahoo and no Google. AOL was Macs only. I had to use dial-up. There were no cable modems, either. My first site even pre-dates the Internet Archive and the Wayback application. It was via Prodigy.

Five years later, Yahoo asked me to become its film critic, around the time that I began reviewing movies on radio station across the country (thank you, Froggy in Fargo for getting me started) and seven years after that, I got a call from Beliefnet, where I am living happily ever after.

As I typed away on that little computer in the study off our bedroom, the desktop that had less power than I currently have in my iPhone, I could never have imagined where it would take me. I am blessed by this journey and by all of you who are kind enough to visit me here. On to the next 20!