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Cover image for A Long, Strange Trip
Greg Bulmash 🥑
Greg Bulmash 🥑

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A Long, Strange Trip

In 2005, I left my role as a writer and photo editor at IMDb to start my own little web incubator, teaching myself PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript along the way.

In 2007, the incubator not providing enough income, I started contracting. My first contract as a developer was at Microsoft, 12 years ago this month, building this intranet site.

I learned C# and ASP.net on the fly to complete it.

Found this image while cleaning up some old files. Back when Vista and IE7 ruled the roost, Firefox had been disruptive but still only had 17ish percent of the market, and Chrome was still a year from being released. Ahh, the memories.

Top comments (3)

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Peter Kim Frank

The dual Google search toolbars (one in the top-right, the other in it's own row) definitely brings back some memories about how browsers used to look.

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Greg Bulmash 🥑

Yup, the default search in IE, which MSFT had to allow you to set to Google as part of the DOJ action, then the Google toolbar with the "pagerank" indicator (every SEO consultant's best friend).

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Peter Kim Frank

I used to hit prchecker.info daily. They had built a tool that sites could display as part of a "badge" which I'm sure was a great source of backlinks for them.