Tuesday, 7th June, 2005

Staking A Claim

photoshop funny becky blog

I am not, it must be said, noted for my desire for self-publicity (stop laughing Kath), nor indeed any particular stroppy princess streak of behaviour (I said stop laughing ). But I thought, what with the current Tranniesphere expansion, I thought I'd get this one in early...

Actually, this was prompted, of sorts, by Becky's comment today:

The cue for all this rambling is that Joanna has copied my idea (shush Siobhan!) and set up a weblog.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not descending into a Stropathon™, I just thought I'd see if we can clear things up a little

AFAIK, my weblog is the second oldest UK trannie weblog — the first being Gina Snowdoll's Eeeeeks! it' a blog!. Her dates back to Sunday, March 04, 2001, mine dates back to Wednesday, 20th February, 2002 (not counting the introductory page, because I can't remember when I wrote that — although it must have been about a week before — just after I registered the domain)

So yeah, I'm prepared to be proved wrong. So if you can beat that, then I'd like to know (and agin, I'm not trying to be all bitchy and competitive — despite what it must look like — I'm just trying to find out)

would you be so prepared give it the old 'heave-ho' if not for the recent bout of 'troll trouble'?

Oh, honestly — it was nothing to do with the trolls (in fact, I quite like them — they give me something to shout/rant at ). It was more to do with things tied in with why I started tranniefesto.co.uk in the first place.

The thing was, basically, that I had put a lot of time, effort and pride into that website — things like the Trannisaurus and the diary weblog. And I wanted to be able to be vocal about them in a wider community than the rather closed space of TrannieWorld.

It's a bit like what I was talking about yesterday — siobhansplace.co.uk was my first journey into doing me-based websites, and therefore it was (initially at least) more about photographs of me (some slightly risqué). But I wanted to be able to interact with other weblogs and sites, without taking along all the baggage that a TV website seems (to me anyway) to have.

It's also slightly tied into wanting to talk about the weblog to my students — I wanted to be able to show them, without being embarassed that there were pictures of me in stockings and suspenders all over the place

So basically, I'm in the position now that I have just this website, things are much further down the line than they were when I first started taking pictures of myself, and I don't feel I need ... wait, what I mean is that I feel siobhansplace.co.uk should mature

Which is why I've been developing http://siobhan.eyefood.co.uk (she said, hoping that the subdomain she set up yesterday works...

Rachel was right about being part of a chain — and I'm going to spend the next few days reinstating the links. I'm also going to be more selective about what photos I put on it.

And then, when I'm happy with it, I'm going to point siobhansplace.co.uk directly to siobhan.eyefood.co.uk

Does it have to be a blog about being a trannie, or just a blog by a trannie?

Oooh — you've got me there I'd say the former, but that would (you could argue) exclude me sometimes.

I think a blog by a trannie, that at least acknowledges that the author is a trannie. How about that?

Sorry, can I just interrupt for a second? Through the wonder of RSS, I discover that Ms Envérité thinks she can out-trump me by dragging up her blog from the mid-eighties...

Well, I didn't really want to have to do this, because it shows my age. But I'm sorry Becky, I'll have to pull out my first tentative steps into the world of computers from the early Seventies, and trump you by about ten years:

used to go into my Dad's work and play on the punched card machine

Me too Jane People often ask me how long I've been using computers, so I tell them that the first computer I played with took punch-cards. Admittedly, I didn't write programs on them — I drew smiley faces on them instead

Joanna, sorry honey, but that thing I think you'll find is the first UK Angels Yahoo group email sent out. If you translates the hieroglyphics, it reads:

The Angels mailing list is very similar to a Usenet newsgroup in many ways, and as such the rules of internet "Netiquette" should also apply here

The earliest trannie blog to date, was unearthed recently in the archives of Trinity College, Dublin:

(I spent all afternoon doing that... )

Ha!

I think I might have found the first instance of someone leaving a comment on a weblog though — and it predates both of us...

I take the point about a blog having to be on a computer Becky, and I wish I could produce a picture of the very first blog that I made, just to show you that you were about 18 centuries too late with your Indifference engine. But unfortunately, I was swimming with it in the Mediteranean — just off the coast of Antikythera in fact, and I dropped it.

Bloody thing rusted away, and now look at it:

Fortunately, I saved a drawing of the plans when I was making it...

Siobhansplace.co.uk

I put it back up — admittedly, it's not the same as it was and the content is a bit sparse. But I'm still trying to track down where things went

D'ya know what though? I'm sat here, looking at the little icon of me at the top left, and I'm thinking to myself "Ack, it would be a lot better to have some kind of graphic there — just like on my boy site". So I jumped into Illustrator to have a poke round all the ideas for things I've had in the past.

And I came across the perfect graphic to use:

But, I think I might have used that somewhere else before

Back to the drawing board...

oldest trannie in the Universe

A title not usually bragged about

We could of course, argue all night who was online first — I dug out my first online site earlier this evening. July 1997 it was Jo, as she points out on her blog was there first in December 1996

I distinctly remember though, about a year prior to that, sitting at my old LCIII underneath my stairs, working through a MacUser article in 1996 about making a "HTL page" for this new thing that was called "The World Wide Web" and thinking "Urgh — the grey background looks *awful"*

Anyway, in regards to siobhansplace, I came up with a symbol

It's too late to explain it now though...