Written in March 2009
This page is not only about my personal blogging history prior to owning my personal domains but also a tribute to the Mauritius Interactive website where I first started blogging. As of February 2009, the Mauritius Interactive website is officially ‘dead’. The website still exists but it shows “All good things come to an end. ” on the main page. Like me, many other people who were members of the Mauritius Interactive will miss the ‘MI days’ as well as the blogs there.
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According to online sources, the term blogging was coined in 1999. The word blog is the short form for the word ‘weblog’ which is a term coined in 1997. However, it took a few years for the term ‘blog’ to be widely known and used.
Before blogging became widely popular, many people were already blogging. They had their own websites or personal pages under other hosts such as blogspot, livejournal, site.voila.fr, xanga, lunarpages, etc. Back then, those people had to learn at least some basic html in order to personalize their own website/personal page. The only difference between now and then is that back then, they didn’t really call it a ‘blog’. They just called it online journal,personal page,personal website,online diary,etc. Nowadays, people all over the world call it a blog.
Blogging in Mauritius, the early days ..
I’m sure that prior to the blogging trend, many Mauritians already had their own website or personal page.
I will never forget Mauritius Interactive,commonly known as MI, an online community for Mauritians. Over the years, the domain names changed a few times but the ones I still remember were:
http://www.mi.mu
http://miweb.mu
http://www.mauritius.ca
http://www.mauritiusinteractive.com
I wanted to do some research about blogging in Mauritius and I emailed the Mauritius Interactive website creator and administrator Joey- back in 2006 to ask him some questions. (Joey is a Mauritian guy who has settled down in Canada.) People can no longer access their accounts at Mauritius Interactive now and Joey’s reply to my email was in my inbox there. It is really fortunate that I had saved a copy of his reply to my email. (I was going to write a blog entry about MI back in Dec 2008.)
Aline: When was MI created?
Joey-: June-July 1999Aline: When were the personal pages system and commenting system implemented on MI? I’ve noticed that for the earliest members of MI, the Quick facts section says that the person is a member since 2001/09/22. That can’t be accurate…or is it?It seems to me that people have signed up on MI even before that.
Joey-:correct users were able to sign up for a membership as of year 2000 but I was not keeping the date of registration until around Sept 2001.
However the personal pages or blogs were implemented around March-April 2001 .Additional note by Aline: The commenting system was implemented in early December 2001. I had to check the first page of comments in my own personal MI page to be sure.
Many Mauritians don’t realize it but they were actually blogging even before this ‘blog phenomenon’ hit Mauritius. The personal pages that each member on MI had can be called blogs too. Entries are in chronological order with the most recent ones first and people can comment on the individual entries. A few more features were implemented later on such as the option to change each personal page setting to public or private(friends only) view. It was all up to the author. Some people preferred more privacy when it comes to posting their entries on MI because some people were hiding behind nicknames to ’stalk’ others.
The people who joined Mauritius interactive were mostly the Sino-Mauritian community. I myself got to know about it during my IRC days when I was chatting on the Mauritius channel on EFnet. At that time, the Sino-Mauritians were chatting on the EFnet server and the other Mauritians were mostly on channel Mauritius on the Dalnet server. (I haven’t chatted on mIRC since years now so I have no idea what it’s like nowadays.) Non Sino-Mauritians also joined Mauritius Interactive but the majority of the members were still the Sino-Mauritians. To me, the members of Mauritius interactive are the first Mauritian bloggers that I knew of. Sadly, ever since the creation of Facebook, most MI members have stopped updating their personal page. I have to admit that I’m guilty of that too. My last update there dates back to 2006 or 2007.
Ever since February 2009, Mauritius Interactive is no more. I kind of wish that the administrator had notified the members before closing down the website. There are so many things that I wanted to save, some emails that I had received, some of the comments,etc. Many things had happened throughout my life and the emails,comments & blog entries on Mauritius Interactive website were written at those times and are kind of like a record of that period of my life. I had already imported some of my blog entries from there and posted them on this blog. (However I preferred not to import the entries which contain photos.) Unfortunately, I don’t have all the entries that I have ever written. In May 2003, I was going through a rough time and wanted a brand new start. I deleted all my older entries prior to May 2003. I have to admit that I really regret doing that but it was too late. There was no way to recover the blog entries.
I’ve made many friends via the Mauritius Interactive community and even got in touch with old friends. I love having my own blog there where I could write down my thoughts or what I had been up to. At that time, in order to upload photos on the blog, I first had to scan the photos and resize them. It was the same for everyone. We all went into a lot of trouble to update our personal pages with photos. Fortunately, getting a digital camera a few years later made it easier afterwards.
I have my own personal domains since early 2004 and in many ways, it was my personal page at Mauritius Interactive which got me interested in having my own personal domain. I had accounts at livejournal, tabulas, lunarpages, voila.fr, blogspot etc. I’ve tried so many before year 2004 until I finally decided that what I really wanted was my own domain.
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It’s now time to bid goodbye to Mauritius Interactive. :flowers:
Some screen captures that I’ve made of my own blog:
Screen captures from the page that I had saved back in 2003. Fortunately I still have some files that I had saved back then on my old external hard disk. (note: I only saved my own page. I didn’t go around saving other people’s pages.)
Back then, my MI page was not only a place for me to blog but also where I could experiment with Html, CSS and javascript. It’s not visible on these screen captures but back then colored scrollbars seemed to be the craze and even those cute animated cursors. I can’t help laughing at myself when I think of what I had done to my MI page at that time. lol. Falling snowflakes (javacript) when it was Christmas time, background music, daily quotes(again javascript), etc. :laughing: Those were the days… 
I seemed to have a thing for the purple color back then. That background image that I was using at that time was gotten somewhere on the internet. I didn’t think of saving the link at that time. >.<
(Click on the photos to see a bigger version of the photos.)
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I made some screen captures from the old pages that can be accessed at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine). As seen in the photos below, some pages aren’t loading completely, hence some images are missing.
From http://web.archive.org/web/20010516003215/http://www.mauritiusinteractive.com/,
http://web.archive.org/web/20010924054818/http://www.mauritiusinteractive.com/
November 2001- Improvement on the website design and new features were added. Smileys were added. More and members were joining.
(note: I have blurred out the email addresses in this photo.)
June 2002-World Cup Challenge, Weekly polls.
February 2003- Different design, 3 Photos of the Day on the main page everyday, MI Chat, MI pagebuilder (to make writing blog entries & managing the entries easier than before), More members, Shows total number of new entries on the main page. Judging from the few number of people online at the time, this was probably during early morning.
(Click on the photos to see a bigger version of the photos.)
More updates soon.
spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam...
[...] This means that it’s the end of Mauritius Interactive. It must have been really a very hard decision for the webmaster to take. After all, MI has existed for almost ten years. Users were able to sign up for membership as from year 2000 but at that time, there were few features available on the website. The main feature at that time was the forums. The personal pages or blogs were implemented around March-April 2001 and the webmaster started keeping track of the date of registration of the members as from Sept 2001. The commenting system was implemented in early December 2001. (information obtained from the creator of Mauritius Interactive himself. See: here.) [...]
Ah me too I had an account at MI. It was only meant to visit the page of my sino-mauritian friends and it was redirected to my blog. It was cool though.