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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Fun read. The article mentions:

> “e/n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term “blog” had gained wider adoption)

Does 'e/n' stand for something? This 1999 post [0] calls it 'Everything and Nothing', but I can't find anything else on it, is that right? It says:

> This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name.

EBG?

I remember unabbreviated 'weblog' that seems all but gone now, but I've never come across 'e/n site' before.

Also, spoiler alert: the domain in question now redirects to a new Github repo with the original site's source. [1]

[0] - http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/

[1] - https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority

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I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for "everything/nothing". In my case, this was exactly correct.

It was a place for my friends to post stupid stuff, a place for me to experiment with css and php, build new "features" just for fun. It was an open playground in a new world. It was a lot of fun. I also just remembered how it was hosted. I became known as the neighborhood kid who collected old computers, so I ended up with a bunch of weird hardware. The site was originally hosted on a 75mhz intel something or another sitting behind a 133mhz linux frankenstein gateway in my bedroom. I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible!

The other cool thing was connecting with other e/n site owners who were also doing their thing. Sometimes you'd collaborate or ping each other's APIs, other times participate in their own experiments. Thousands of little web sites with micro communities built on spaghetti code, almost all have certainly faded away through the various ways that tiny sites die: a web host gets sold, an upstream system upgrade botched but not addressed, a missed payment, an unpatched vulnerability. Maybe today the owner still maintains the domain name out of nostalgia. Shoutout to gyrate.org and sejje.net; Rest in peace, frikk.tk

> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible!

Same here, though probably about a decade later on early versions of mobile data. They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.

> They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.

Never lose hope.

Hey, frikk.

What did you call that little chat box? Shoutbox?

You invented twitter, pretty sure.

Haha. Hey dude. I figured you'd find your way over here. :P

Forgot all about that little shoutbox.

> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data

Lots of data accounting systems 'back in the day' counted every packet as 1500 bytes. So if you send 1 million packets it was

     1,500 * 1,000,000 = 1.5GB

In reality the average packet size in 98 or so was much smaller

     600 * 350,000 = 210 MB
     1,500 * 650,000 = 975 MB
     Total = 1.185GB (a difference of 315MB)

https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-analysis/pkt_size_dis...

Depending on your packet profile you may have seen anywhere from a 20 to 50% overhead.

Which is ridiculous. I worked at an ISP in '99, and even back then it was just Apache log parsing with Perl (whether that be a custom script or some open source project written in Perl). Colocation usage was done by logging byte counters on switch ports.

This was a small independent ISP with maybe 3-4 sysadmins/network operations people. Not doing at least that much seems pretty rinky-dink to me. It was trivial to do that much.

I enjoyed my fifteen minutes of fame via e/n, though the attention ultimately resulted in the demise of my site. It was all fun and games until the lines between the internet "playground" and real life were blurred, and my school/parents started getting phone calls. Social media also deteriorated the separation between "online" and "IRL". I retired my site in favor of a career :)

The explanation I read back in the day was that e/n is something that means everything to the person who's writing it, and nothing to everyone else.

SomethingAwful still has an e/n forum for personal problems

It was always everything/nothing. Because back then websites usually had some kind of purpose or category which usually was reflected in the domain name as well. But then sites like Stile Project and others mentioned there came out just talking about whatever the author wanted to rant about (IE the modern internet). So the category was everything and it was about nothing really important.

> Does 'e/n' stand for something?

Back when the term was current it was described to me as standing for "entertainment/news".

(This was by someone who ran a small e/n site and generally followed the scene - though of course it could still be wrong.)

It was entertainment / news for me.

Back when I was reading those e/n sites I knew it as everything/nothing, the sites themselves would call it that too. As in, talking about anything they want, doesn't even have to be important.

everything and nothing. I ran such a site with a few friends in the late 90s/early 00s. Embarrassing proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20000521031551/http://www.thedayt... .. they were basically a genre of pre-blog sites where mostly (but not entirely) 15-25 year old males posted total trash like pictures of celebs they liked, offensive jokes, and, well, total trash :)

e/n had a variety of celebs itself. "Stile" was in the scene and took clickbaiting to the extreme (though it wasn't called that at the time) by essentially turning into a site packed with "extreme" images and porn. A perennially down on his luck Rush Limbaugh fan called Jon Bence was also pretty famous for describing his mundane life in excruciating detail.

The scene fizzled out within a few years, particularly once "blogging" became its own actual thing.

I had an e/n site in the mid to late 90s with some popularity. I think StileProject probably coined the term. There was a whole group of people who were "internet famous" at the time whose names have been forgotten but I see "derivative work" every day.

As for the meaning, yes, everything/nothing. Your blog is about everything and nothing. Seinfeld is "a show about nothing."

The best definitions I could find:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e%2Fn

I always knew it as entertainment/news

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