I’ve been active online since 1996 – when there was not even social media or anything. People used to discuss their favorite artists through newsletters that kept coming through E-MAIL – you just added your comment and passed it on somehow, I don’t even remember exactly how it worked. But it was easier to get noticed back then, because there wasn’t that much info on the web. It was still new.

The reason I even got online writing about my rock’n’roll meetings, was only because I was friends with, and a huge fan of Black Sabbath’s Tony Martin at the time – and I had offered to create his first own Internet-page. Even back in those days, that was a super-cool thing and pretty rare to have your own webpage.

In order to do that, I needed to learn html-programming, photo-editing, scanning, ftp-uploading, and how to use html-editors. I just found one of those old pages that said: This file created 99-09-22 00.36 by Claris Home Page version 2.0

Oh my god. :) Claris Home Page?! It was about as basic as you could get! Anyway – I needed to practice first, so I created a webpage but had to find a theme for it. I had just been to a few Whitesnake-concerts in the UK and decided to just write about that and upload some pics just to illustrate it. I never thought that anyone but me would even FIND that page, that wasn’t the intention at all. 

When I woke up the next day and turned on my computer – my mailbox was FULL of messages from people from all over the world who had somehow (to this day I don’t know how!) found that Whitesnake-story! They loved it. And that made me realize that I had something here… That maybe I could do something more with it.

So I started writing, adding more photos and memories, and the reaction was the same. Thousands of people visiting the page, leaving messages in the guest-book (yep, the days before MySpace and Facebook – if anyone even remembers…) I was overwhelmed! I had only wanted to make a test-page for myself, so that I could do a decent job with Tony’s, but it took a different turn that I could never have anticipated. 

That was the word “go” – and here I am, in 2012, fifteen years later, still doing this online-thing. The difference is that not as many people notice as back then. Now there is so much stuff out there that you DROWN in the sea of webpages and information. You’re lucky to have loyal followers at all these days.

It’s amazing to me that people still seem to enjoy the various stories from the past and from more current episodes. I want to thank you all so much for your support and for following me – new subscribers as well as the “veterans” who have been around through all these years – cause I know there are a few of you. :)

I’ll soon “dust off” an old story from my meeting with Iron Maiden back in 1999, so stick around.