So Adland turns 28 years old now, officially. I know that's "settle down and get married have kids" kind of old. But Adland is just a website, see, she has all the time in the world to figure herself out, she can become anything! But really.
Either way, colleagues old and new have been sending me congratulations on Linkedin for weeks now. Which is sweet but I don't use Linkedin...
So. Awkward.
(You are all appreciated! Everyone! Even on an app that I don't use!)
Decades ago I set the official birthday of Adland to be April 1, simply because I couldn't remember when I had begun working on it. I knew the year, just not the exact date. So an April Fools joke it was. Later, all these dates and info became a way of filling in forms when you began a "brand" account.
This is why the LinkedIn app on my phone keeps pinging me right now, and I keep swiping it away like I'm annoyed by a blowfly.
The bizarre thing about Adland as a website is that I made it on HTML and floppy discs that I carried to internet cafés and libraries long before I owned a computer that was connected to the internet. With that kind of beginning, in-jokes were bound to happen. As in-jokes where I literally only spoke to myself and didn't expect anyone else to discover the hilarity.
So now that y'all are giving me high-fives for running Adland for this long, I'll share the silly with you. For 28 years, I've been embedding Ascii art into the headers of Adland's source code. Just because it's funny.
ASCII art has a special place in my heart, because when I studied advertising, this brilliant man named Paul Arden taught me about the freedom of limitations.
"Always art direct your ad from the ugliest aspect," he said, "If it's the (colors of) the brand logo, so be it."
And that's probably how I ended up with a personal blog, written in Perl, limited to character width and color, with only ASCII art in monospaced fonts as decoration.
This was a few years before my daughter Perl was born, which isn't related. Certainly not her name. Wink, nudge. Say no more. That 100% Perl blog looked like this in 2003, and a Perl script (naturally) changed the "sig file" quip on the right every three minutes or so, using over 6000 sig files of funny lines that I had made up and collected over the years.
So, ignore the drama going on up there, I can't recall exactly how my bought and paid-for domain was hijacked like that, but it was just dumb security on the registrar's part. Be careful with your registrars. I would use Namecheap or Joker, but nobody else at all today. Never go with GoDaddy.
Anyway,
Back in 2006, this is what Adland told anyone who looked at the source. Which I assume people did. :)
"Built on beer and bravery" was the line, always. I think it's a pretty good one, even if I am not a copywriter.
I like this one, it's my perfect "2013 troll sarcasm" dry meh kind of illustration. She was the "perfect troll" of the source in 2013.
I could probably show you more, the point is simpler - if something has been going for over twentyfive years, it might be run by someone who has a passion for it.
Everyone has a passion for new media, but do they every figure out how to keep it?
