Dancing Baby Waves Bye-Bye

2 posted on April 2, 2009

POSTED IN: Blog Posts, Culture

Yesterday was April 1, better known as April Fools’ Day. This unofficial holiday is one of my favorite days of the year. A whole day devoted to jokes and pranks! The Ruggles have always been pranksters so we really get into the spirit of the celebration. And as a designer/blogger/web-geek I love pulling some good Internet prankage.

Last year I redecorated my blog with all kinds of Microsoft stuff like a signed picture of Bill Gates and me proudly proclaiming “I love Windows!” Completely and totally untrue but all in good fun.

This year I decided to kick it old school. I’m talking 1998 web design. Ugly tiling gray backgrounds, embedded midi sound files and LOTS of animated gifs. It was truly horrendous. Oddly enough I also broke all my site records with over 3,000 page views, 1,000 plus unique visitors and over 60 Tweets about the post. So it just goes to show you, old school is always in style!

Several people said they were creeped out by the little dancing baby. For those of you who didn’t catch the culture reference, the dancing baby is actually a piece of Internet history. It was one of the first viral videos (animated gif actually, but close enough) that spread all over the Internet back in 1996-1997. So any self-respecting old-school site wouldn’t be complete without the dancing baby.

But alas, the old school look was just too cool for me. So I had to switch back to my trusty blog theme that we all know and love. April Fools’ Day is over. But there’s always next year to think about…

What are some of your oldest memories of jumping on the World Wide Web?
Anyone remember Geocities? Compuserve? Newsgroups? The AOL CDs?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 7:15 am and is filed under Blog Posts, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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1 sTim said:

Heck, I’m old school enough that I remember my first experiences involving (a) sending emails through a local “ISP” that made Internet runs twice a day to deliver the messages, thus allowing you to communicate outside whatever service you were on (AOL, Compuserve, local – I belonged to all of them at some point anyway), and (b) first surfing the great world wide web through Gopher – a text based browser that has showed [IMAGE] or [LINK] instead of the actual thing. And then, of course, using Netscape 2 and 3, which both crashed about every third page.
And yes, I had a Geocities homepage at one point, and stacks worth of AOL discs, CDs, and the like.
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2 Abbey said:

Getting all those free AOL trials in the mail. Oh, and there was that Exodus video game for PCs…
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3 jonathan said:

You can’t hide that dancing baby somewhere on your site?
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4 Molly said:

At one point we had so many AOL CD’s at my house we thought about gluing them to the wall as a decorative item (shiny side up-for a crazy mirror effect) thank goodness I got a divorce before THAT ever happened

Molly’s last blog post..Then Sings My Soul Saturday-Give Me Eyes
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5 tom hinton said:

great sight dude. i was in chile when internet first came out. a friend flew in to santiago and said, we we drove from the airport, “i want to show you something.” so i see compuserve for the first time, getting on landline, getting a message, getting off, reading and writing and then doing landline connection again. up to this time, every thing was done by fax if it went though. now i communicate with the world through internet within seconds. amazing. but freinds, lets remember a table and a cup of coffee is still the best.

tom hinton’s last blog post..A look at last years trip to the Dominican Republic
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6 sTim said:

@tomhinton: Unless of course you happen to hate coffee. But that would just make me un-American, I suppose. =)
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7 Nick said:

Compuserve
AOL Chat Rooms
IM was the greatest thing around when it first came out through AOL.
Tons of great memories from my first days on the nets.

Nick’s last blog post..“Yep Its Done” Ferrari Loses Battle With Train
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8 Brunettekoala said:

ICQ – where I met one of my bestest friends bizarrely. He’s a guy, so that’s always a fun one to try and explain without it sounding like we were looking to date or something

Geocities – I was sunshine_ky12 and I had my own website called ‘Laurieland’ CRINGE!

Yahoo! Chat rooms – endless time spent there asking a/s/l and such like…

Brunettekoala’s last blog post..Kreativ Blogger Awards
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9 joseph said:

totally remember all of the aol cd’s……oh my God they were everywhere.
My first real memory of the internet was really really slow email.

joseph’s last blog post..6 foot chicken