---
layout: post
title: "Read/Write Web 17 years ago"
tags:
  - Richard MacManus
  - Wayback Machine
  - blogging
  - SARS
  - Dave Smith
categories:
  - On This Day
excerpt: "Richard MacManus writes about starting his Read/Write Web blog back in 2003. This gets me browsing my own site and a few links to explore what the time was like. Including discovering a post by Dave Smith about SARS from around the same time."
---
Richard MacManus writes about starting his Read/Write Web blog:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en" author="@bmann">
	<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Today 17 years ago, I started a blog called Read/Write Web. Nobody celebrating this anniversary but me, but it’ll always be a big part of my life. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030809061335/http://www.readwriteweb.com:80/2003/04/20.html">web.archive.org/web/20030809061335/http://www.readwriteweb.com:80/2003/04/20.html</a></p>&mdash; @ricmac <a href="https://twitter.com/ricmac/status/1252135125460021250">April 20, 2020</a>
</blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

There were very few people reading AND writing back then. The "Two Way Web" was just getting started with open source and blogging software and virtual hosts making it so people could publish more easily. MacManus was definitely one of the must reads at the time, although even finding new sources meant following links in blogs that you already read.

Here's a screenshot of his link to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030809061335/http://www.readwriteweb.com:80/2003/04/20.html"><img src="https://ipfs.runfission.com/ipfs/QmfBVCvn5p7YMes3czn9pSW1jb4qej2fcZdpBzcr9jwD9u/readwriteweb-wayback-2003-08-09.png" /></a>

Which, of course, got me to thinking about what my blog looked like at the time. I was still living in Ottawa, but was about 4-5 months away from moving back to the west coast.

I was running Drupal, had a theme I had customized myself, including a custom header image for 'B. Mann Consulting' by my friend Troy. Yeah yeah -- I really should have picked a better domain name!

Here's the [front page of bmannconsulting.com on April 22nd, 2003](http://web.archive.org/web/20030422105837/http://www.bmannconsulting.com/):

<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030422105837/http://www.bmannconsulting.com/"><img src="https://ipfs.runfission.com/ipfs/QmfBVCvn5p7YMes3czn9pSW1jb4qej2fcZdpBzcr9jwD9u/bmannconsulting-wayback-2003-04-22.png" /></a>

(and clearly I didn't know enough CSS to figure out how to fix that image overflow!)

Because hosting was complicated, a few friends blogged on my site. On the sidebar, various RSS feeds and blogs got sucked into the site. In part for using as a casual feed reader, which then also made it really easy to "reblog" directly on the site.

That link to SARS on the sidebar looked interesting. Turns out Dave Smith blogged about SARS. Good for him, [his post from April 17th, 2003, is still online](http://www.smithdm3.com/archives/000070.html) (no longer running Drupal, but archived as an HTML export).

Strange to be seeing comments from me and others in there on this very relatable topic.