Published Oct 1. 2012 - 12 years ago
Updated or edited Feb 11. 2018

The first (fishing) blog.... ever?

Blogs are very common these days, and we have one too. But ours started back when blogs were an almost unknown concept - in 1996!

A typical entry - Not much color, not many images. Manual HTML all the way.
Early blog entry
Martin Joergensen

Back in 1996 there was no such thing as blogs - or web-logs as they were originally called. Blogging software was unknown - actually software for making web pages was almost unknown. There was no such thing as Blogger, Blogspot or any of the other online systems that sustain literally millions of blogs worldwide. Blogs as such didn't really appear until 1997 and 1998.
Never the less, GFF had a blog in 1996!

Well, to be honest, it wasn't GFF and it wasn't a blog, but anyhow...

From April 1st 1996 and a couple of years ahead, I wrote regular entries on my then web site Fishing Denmark, which was later to merge with two other sites to become The Global FlyFisher.

Never the less, GFF had a blog in 1996!

I simply wrote about my fishing here in Denmark, the conditions, the seasons, the weather and whatnot, and the technology behind it was quite simple.

Earlier - The old archive was manually maintained
Old archive
Martin Joergensen

Manual HTML

Since the whole site was made as static and manually edited HTML-files, so was the blog. I would rename the current index.html file to its date, create a new one and write my blog entry.
In this way the blog would always show the latest entry, and the rest would go in an archive, which unfortunately meant that it lost all contact with the surface of the earth unless I remembered to manually enter a link to the file into the link page, which I called earlier.htm.

Back then I had web space on my company's web server, and the original address for the blog is now dead and gone, of course. But as with everything on GFF, we save old stuff, and the list you see below is machine generated and holds links to all the original entries.
I stopped doing these regular diary entries in 1998, but in 2003 we revived the blog idea, this time in a much sleeker and fully automated version, which has been running ever since and has a ton of entries.

But to think about it... GFF had the first fishing blog ever, and probably one of the earliest blogs at all.

Comments

Martin Joergensen's picture

Howard, I'm certa...

Howard,

I'm certainly glad too! It's been a amazing journey with GFF now approaching the end of its second decade online. The first article (a gallery page) was actually online in the beginning of 1994, so that's already well past the 20 year mark - but the formal celebration of the 20 year anniversary will be sometime early next year I think.

Martin

Martin

Well I'm glad you st...

Well I'm glad you started your blog way back then. Let me say I'm glad you started this web site. It's consistently great! Thanks for all you do.

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