Throwback: Perkins Farm Blog

The year was 2002. I took a 6 month leave of absence in order to build a house on a rural property that had been in my family for generations. I decided to blog the project, which was kind of a new thing to do at the time.

There was a challenge. There was no internet available near the job site. Where I was staying I couldn't even do dial up, we were on a party line.

So how to blog with no internet access?

I had no internet, but I did have a Nokia phone, T9 predictive text, and the ability to send SMS text messages.

So I became an early customer of Blogger, before they were acquired by Google, at a time when Ev Williams was supporting users directly. They ran a gateway that allowed me to send a blog post as an SMS message from my Nokia, and the gateway would take the message and append it to my blog.

The blog was hosted on tripod.com, more or less to this day, although at some point in the last twenty years tripod had injected so much adware into my html it had become completely unreadable. So I've removed that crap and resurrected it – if you'd like to take a journey back to 2002/2003 – I invite you to visit https://craigconboy.ca/perkinsfarm/

It seems to be optimized for IE5 and Netscape Navigator 6 but will probably still work if you happen to be using an older browser.