Web Sites for Writers, circa 1999

It was 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and after a long day at work I ran to the King of Prussia Mall . It was still warm from the 72 degree temperatures from that afternoon. I stopped in at one of my favorite stores, Gene's Books, the largest and best bookstore before large chain bookstores were created.


I scanned the magazine racks and bought a special issue of Writer's Digest called "Writing for the Web."

I don't actually remember any of this, but I recently found the magazine in the attic with the Gene's Books receipt inside. Scanning the magazine, an article titled "101 Best Web Sites for Writers" caught my eye.

The listing starts with search engines. Guess what the first recommended listing is? Nope, google wasn't around yet. It's Search. Yeah, that's the one I use every day. Others listed: AltaVista (later bought by Yahoo!), Dogpile, Ask Jeeves (now just Ask), DejaNews (which became Deja and eventually sold to google).

Yahoo! was listed, but under "other."

For dictionaries, two are listed: Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day (the dictionary is by subscription but there's an RSS feed for the Word of the Day) and Bucknell's Web of Online Dictionaries. I was surprised Merriam-Webster wasn't listed; I remember it being online in 1998 and wikipedia says it was online in 1996.

And speaking of Wikipedia, it's not listed. The listing recommends Encyberpedia. And forget Google Maps, it lists Mapquest.

There are some good resources listed, but now you could reduce seven pages of content to one line, "If you need information, google it."

The intro to the article by Bill Brohaugh said it best, "Constant change is a daunting aspect of the web (not only so much information, but so much more tomorrow), but that very change is also one of the Web's most exciting advantages."