Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML.

1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.

My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.

Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.

I was the first person I knew to learn HTML; that was in the mid-90’s. I had a personal website from December of 1996, where I posted mostly book reviews; later it evolved into a hand-coded blog, followed by MovableType, followed by WordPress, which I still use.