Gluestick

I started writing some pages in 2000 on a website that I'd called "Gluestick." That was at Homepage.com, which had a free hosting service. I was living in Amsterdam and going online at the supercybercafe Easy Everything.

I'd learned about homepage.com from the tech support person at "De Leydse Herberg," a "grand café" on Leidseplein, a busy tourist-oriented square. Previously, I'd been doing my first page-building experiments with a service called freeservers.com, recommended to me by an American friend.

After a few months, Homepage went tits-up in a carefully orchestrated fashion. The log-in button on their own home page disappeared. I didn't take this cue to back up my files.

I began to use Geocities, mostly because I liked its preview function. It created the preview above the edit window, so I could just scroll down to preview, instead of navigating (slowly) back. The pages that I made in this fashion, I still have. But most of what I wrote online when I was in Amsterdam is now lost to the deep archives of forgotten internet history.

Homepage.com disappeared altogether, later. The address re-directed to Frontera.com, and a page that looked exactly the same. Same missing log-in button, too. Only a different name.

(I notice that now, in early 2004, homepage.com is a web-hosting service again [as it would be.] Frontera is something else completely. {Note: in 2013, "homepage.com" re-directs to "realestate.com." Even the name itself has now been relegated to the scrap-heap.})

I haven't asked homepage.com if I can have my pages back. After all, the failure of internet companies around that time is legendary. The broken remains of dot-com businesses littered the highways and parking lots of that early 21st-century information-economy wasteland.

So to speak.

But, I continued to use my email. And, since Yahoo owned Geocities, I "logged in" to my website account every time I read or sent anything.

But everything I made at Gluestick-slash-homepage.com is gone.