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Posted by Susan James
September 26, 2010
Filed in Society Girl's Personal Blogs
2,509 views
Happy anniversary to me!
Today I have been a member of Katie's site for exactly nine years.
In September 2001 I first went on to the internet, using a TV/Internet box - wires everywhere, dial-up and a rubber-keyed keyboard something like the old Sinclair ZX series. I knew a little about computers and nothing about the net - the box had sat unopened for a couple of months before I dared try it out.
Little did I kow what I was letting myself in for! The instuctions were minimal, to say the least, and at one point I got caught for a huge phone bill - no-one told me you could open a story from Fictiomania then disconnect while you read it.
Around the same time I started to look for tranny stuff online - I had been full-time for about 18 months by then, and beginning to get my act together. There were a reasonable number of meet'n'greet'n'chat sites, and I signed up to most of them.
Oh my, was I naive! It took less than one evening before I knew rather more about sex and cybersex than I could use in a lifetime! Within 24hrs about half the sites were deprived of my sparkling wit and scyntillating conversation, and all but a couple were hit with a delete button soon after.
One of the latter was called Trannyweb. There were less than 200 members at the time, and only about a quarter of those were in the UK. The forums were informative, but it was the chatroom that won me over. Ok, it was less than reliable and did weird things, (including not working at all), but the people were brilliant. Just a bunch of girls (mainly from the UK or USA) chatting about anything and everything. One night it might be football (American or soccer), another it could be shoes and shopping. The next time you went in trans issues could be on the agenda, with comparisons from both sides of the pond.
New members were welcomed and encouraged to join in, and their questions answered - both the internet and being trans were new to many. Sure, we got the occasional idiot, but they soon left when they found out it was not a knocking shop!
Since then the site has grown and matured, been updated and moved with the times. (And moved servers and changed programmers and such, with the accompanying hiccoughs!). The latest was a change of name,to get us out of the clutches of the dreaded blacklists - in many places (like where I work) the only way to access the site was through a proxy by-pass.
The next thing on the agenda is a new site altogether, hopefully doing away with the bitsa this and that we currently have and everything being integrated.
And I will still be here, reading the forums and dropping into chat and generally enojoying what is probably still the best TG site on the web.
