Fifteen 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 parents’ point of view.
At that time, 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 me and here are my ten favorite links” website. And I wanted to write movie reviews. So I decided to combine the two.
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.
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 one that probably 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 15!