When I walked over to the Argent Hotel today to peek in at Web 2.0, I couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic when I passed the old Salon.com offices at 706 Mission Street, right next door to the Argent. It was in that building where we migrated Salon to Linux and built our own CMS (though we used Solaris, Oracle, Apache, and Perl for that. . . SOAP, not LAMP, I guess. MySQL wasn’t quite there yet.) Ah, building a CMS. . . how Web 1.0 of us!
Earlier tonight, I sent an IM to my friend Mignon (the founding art director at Salon.com and designer of the Salon logo) to say, “Hey, I was over at the Argent today for Web 2.0 — remember back in early ’99 when I pulled an all-nighter when we rolled out the new CMS and redesign? You bought me breakfast there that morning and I almost feel asleep in my pancakes.” I don’t think I had actually been inside the Argent since then (six years ago!), but that long-forgotten image of my forehead drooping dangerously close to the maple syrup on my plate came to me out of nowhere today when I walked in. (Had I fast-forwarded six years to this morning for my breakfast at the Argent, I probably would have found my droopy head propped up with a stack of VC cash.)
Strangely enough, Mignon IM’ed me back to say, “We’re pushing out a redesign right now!” I took a quick glance and it looks great. Nearly five years after I left Salon, I’m still proud to have been a part of it and remain a big fan. A big congrats to the folks over there who made this redesign happen. . . . nice work.
Chad Dickerson's blog 