I entered my details in Blogtree for fun, it didn’t seem to catch that one of my parent blogs, Virulent Memes started after mine, but that’s when my blog wasn’t a blog, but was previously inspired and named after “plan” style logs.
In Unix systems, a user could create a plan file associated with their user account, containing information about themselves, viewable by other users on the system using the finger command. In the pre-blogging years where a number of different forms of online journals and diaries existed, it was popular for some Unix users to use their plan file as a personal log. Neat little programs often written in Perl were used to finger these personal logs and publish them as HTML.
The most notable plan filers of the period in my mind were the logs maintained by the developers of Quake 2. As they developed the game they gave insights into the kinds of things being added on a daily basis via their plan files. Sadly plan files are rarely, if ever, mentioned in any of the “there was nothing before blogging” - histories of weblogging.
Bah.. more blogging about blogs. It was just like when I was briefly into CB’s and Amateur Radio as a kid, it used to shit me as all they’d talk about were how big their aerials were.
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