About the Unhelpful Blog

Hello there! This Unhelpful Blog is a personal site with posts that go as far as 1997. This site could be generally unhelpful to most of you, but helpful and faithful to its creator whom you might (or most probably might not) know as Cheryl (who in the late ’90s cyberworld is affectionately known as webmaster Inday). Yes she has been weaving the web since the late 90s (when some of you were probably not born yet – haha!), and blogs were not yet called blogs.

A few people know her websites as Indayworks or LuvKoSiInday.com. Many of the content from those old sites are migrated here in this all-new UnhelpfulBlog. Inday decided to change the name of her personal site to The Unhelpful Blog, because in general her posts here really don’t aim to help anyone find anything. Of course, a few ( and a few more of her fans in the late ’90s would argue otherwise, but we don’t know where they are now) of you may find some posts helpful.

Most importantly- Inday’s family and friends (who might be the sole visitors of this site now) might find some of the entries here nostalgic and a celebration of our youth -LOL- (Glorietta, Greenbelt, Venn, TGI Friday’s etc). Or if anyone is looking for a few snaps of the late ‘90s and early 2000’s internet scene in the Philippines (the period when I was very active in the web design scene in the Philippines), some posts might be helpful as reference to Philippine web/internet research work. Geez, this feels old!

The Unhelpful Blog has:

No regular updates

The Unhelpful Blog is not regularly updated as its unhelpful creator cannot help herself find a regular time updating the Unhelpful Blog.

1 Unhelpful Team member

The Unhelpful Blog only has 1 unhelpful team consisting of 1 unhelpful creator (the Unhelpful Blog Author herself) who has problems with personal time management, hence the infrequent updates.

No display advertising

The Unhelpful Blog in its new inception does not have enough page views nor unique visitors to help you reach your market. It may however have some indirect endorsements in reference to some good features of companies, services, or entities encountered by the Unhelpful author.

Privacy

The Unhelpful Blog does not collect any of your data with the exception of aggregated traffic numbers collected by Google Analytics with no personally-identifying information.

No contact forms

If you wish to contact the author, due to spam, there is no direct way to do so. You can try to leave comments on posts or tweet the Unhelpful Blog owner over Twitter.

More about…

More about the history (eww) and context of this Unhelpful Blog (so it doesn’t become totally unhelpful) — if you’re bored, read on:

Why are there entries from the late ’90s?

Well, you need to know a bit about Inday. This is the part where I get to brag about being much much older than millennials.

The creator of this Unhelpful Blog, Inday, first created her personal website in 1996 in the VAX Unix computer laboratory of De La Salle University-Manila, where manually coded HTML, using Pico, her first personal website. She didn’t have her own domain name yet, it was published under her /~ public html webspace in the College of Computer Studies (CCS)’s server and was pretty much text-based (but hey, her site looks great on a Unix terminal!). This pretty much was the start of her neverending love for the web. Unfortunately she doesn’t have copies of her Unix-based personal site, else she would have probably have a few more silly posts dating back to ’96.

Anyway eventually a few PC-based internet terminals in the computer lab started having Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer browsers (which were very cool then), and by then she has started using power text editors, MS Paint (yes she has to admit), and then Dreamweaver, and finally used Photoshop instead of paint (thank goodness!). At this point her sites already has some sort of backup.

The Unhelpful Blog author, aka INDAY in the early 2000’s posing with her Pentium III desktop with a Viewsonic 800×600 monitor (with ICQ, Internet Explorer on), her trusty 2kg Dell Inspiron, an Epson printer, and a Fuji scanner. Stacked underneath the computer table is her first love, a Pentium 2 DX machine with 8GB hard disk and 16MB of ram.). In the background are a few of her awards from the Philippine Web Awards.

Why are there news clippings from old newspapers and extinct internet technology sites?

This is the part where I get to brag about being a Web 0.0 star!

Vain yet naturally entertaining (based on her site reviews and critics!), her old personal sites (from Indayworks.com, then LuvKoSiInday.com, IndayXP, Inday.heyey.com) became a bit popular and had received a lot of visitors (and return visitors). It received site features, link reviews from Tanikalang Ginto (probably one of the first manually-created web directory of websites about the Philippines/Filipino people) were kind of helpful in an entertaining way to a few netizens in the Philippines and a few outside the Philippines, that they won awards. The old sites had a LOT of trivial posts, friend-related posts, work-related posts, and webcam selfies (before the term ‘selfie’ was even used) which people somehow liked (at 0.3 to 1megapixel yes they were considered cool before!). Most importantly she also featured a few people whom she has met – online or offline – and answers guestbook posts, even if they were silly, which made many of her visitors feel as being a part of her site.

Many of the news clippings though are related to the awards of the website she made for Donna Cruz, which first started as a fan site which shortly became the celebrity’s official website, and a couple of other sites that she created related to work / freelancing.

An article about Inday by Dart Tiglao published in Chalk Magazine in early 2000’s. One of a handful of old articles written about Inday and her other web works.

What is Barangay Inday?

This is the part where I get to brag about having some sort of followers before social media was invented! Geez – very old haha.

Inday met many people via her personal sites, several of them fellow web developers and designers. Site visitors kept messaging Inday and her friends, wanting to be a part of their circle of friends too, so one of them coined the term Barangay Inday — (the term ‘Barangay’ defined here⬈ ). The sites eventually had more visitors after it won a few awards and attracted more netizens that the Barangay needed to have its own own messageboards. In the messageboards people log on and ask questions from Inday herself or from her Barangay Inday friends.

Some Barangay Inday members at the 3rd Philippine Web Awards. Missing members not able to attend: Jayadewa, Marie, Kung Pao, Dessyang, Joseph, and the rest of the people in the Barangay messageboards who wanted to go(!).

In a sense her old personal website(s) had definition of first-generation true ‘followers’– there was no RSS feed available for visitors to keep abreast of site posts, no social media platform where you can systematically “follow” and get notified of new posts. But her website visitors kept visiting and posting on the message boards (yes the messageboards had threads over 10 pages with posts from different netizens just saying hi, asking trivial / friendship / work / love-related questions in general). It sort of became like an online hangout place. Some of the frequent visitors even wanted to meet up with the rest of the Barangay members.

Years later, when social networking sites were born, Inday and her solid/core Barangay Inday friends used those to keep in touch instead.

ANYWAY to stop blabbering — this Unhelpful Blog contains many of the old content from the old personal sites. Many of them won’t really make sense to you guys now, but they do to us, 90s kids.

If you’ve read up to here…thanks!

The Unhelpful Blog creator would like to thank you from the bottom of its creator’s sometimes-unhelpful heart if you’ve read up to this part of the page. Thanks for dropping by, you are the world. ❤️

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Haha — joke lang!