The History of the Web is my (Jay Hoffmann) side project. I've been doing it for a few years, and in that time it's become a few different things.
It’s a twice-monthly newsletter you can sign up for…
Prefer RSS? Fine by me
The heart and soul of this site is my newsletter and most of the research I do goes into the stories I write for it. Emails go out on the first and third Tuesday of every month with a new post. I end each month with what I've been calling my weblog — a collection of web history related links I've collected for the month. Most of my posts are pretty short, giving you a snapshot of the web's history in 5 to 10 minutes. Sometimes they're a bit longer.
It’s an evolving timeline that charts the web’s history…
This project began with a timeline. When I first created this site, my goal was to create a detailed timeline that spans the entire history of the web. That journey continues and I add to the timeline on this site frequently. Most of my ideas come from researching for this timeline, and I try to call that out in the posts themselves when I publish them.
Here’s a few things I’ve added to the timeline recently.
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JSON
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Mercury Center Web
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NYTimes.com Launch
And now it's an ongoing series at CSS Tricks...
Starting this year, I've been doing something a bit different over at CSS Tricks. I'm writing a regular, more in-depth column that gathers all the spiraling threads of history and tells the full story of the web — chapter by chapter — from the beginning. Each chapter focuses on a single theme, with new chapters every month or two.
Explore the chaptersIt's also a blog...
I wouldn't be a good citizen of the web (read: netizen) if I didn't host all of this on my website. So everything I publish and have published can be found right here. To make things easier to find, I've broken everything out into a few categories.
Main stories, part of the timeline
Shorter stories, outside timeline
The greatest websites in (web) history
Your monthly link roundup, web focused, history adjacent
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