{"id":136,"date":"2026-06-12T12:57:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webby.is\/?p=136"},"modified":"2026-06-12T14:50:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T17:50:58","slug":"webby-a-background","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webby.is\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"Webby &#8211; a Background"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was five o\u2019clock in the morning in 1999\u2014possibly 1998, but who\u2019s counting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was up an hour earlier than necessary because I was finally getting the Internet back. I\u2019d been offline for a day or two while waiting for some mysterious piece of equipment to arrive. A modem? An ADSL box? I no longer remember. What mattered was that my phone line was finally being liberated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Back then, being online meant tying up the phone. If I was surfing the web, nobody could call me\u2014and I spent far too much time online. Everything was connected, my provider had promised the service would be active, and sure enough, I got online without any trouble. Then came the surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My friendly Internet provider, Telia, had decided that I needed a new email address. This wasn\u2019t entirely bad news. Up until then they had insisted on wonderfully cumbersome addresses that looked something like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">firstname.lastname@0455-12345.telia.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apparently they had finally realized that this wasn\u2019t the pinnacle of user-friendly design, because now customers could choose their own address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem was that it was five o\u2019clock in the morning, I hadn\u2019t had enough coffee, and I was suddenly expected to come up with something clever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn\u2019t necessarily want my own name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wanted something snazzy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t remember what I tried first, but eventually I typed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>webby<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To my astonishment, it was available. At the time I thought I was being tremendously creative. I liked ducks, and I liked the World Wide Web, so \u201cWebby\u201d seemed like the obvious choice. And just like that, it stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This all took place in Sweden, where nobody associated ducks with the word \u201cweb.\u201d Later, when I tried to use the name elsewhere, I discovered that the rest of the world had rather different ideas. Still, I could never quite let it go. It perfectly captured my two enduring obsessions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul id=\"block-897b6233-304f-4b3b-977a-90387a561e9d\" class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Ducks<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The Web<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More than twenty-five years later, it still feels like me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So when the opportunity arose to revive this old WordPress site\u2014originally created in 2026\u2014it felt only natural to bring Webby back to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For many years I had to settle for \u201cWebby\u2019s\u201d with the possessive&nbsp;<em>s<\/em>. Close enough, but never quite right. These days, with the .me domain attached, I can choose to interpret it more generously:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Webby\u2019s.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Or, if one is feeling charitable:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Webby is me.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The only place I ever managed to get plain old&nbsp;<strong>webby<\/strong>&nbsp;was with my Swedish Internet provider all those years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Until now.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Discover the origin story behind the digital handle Webby, a name born at 5 AM in 1999 during the early days of the internet in Sweden. Combining a passion for ducks and the World Wide Web, this unique identity has endured for over twenty-five years and now finds a new home on a revived WordPress site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ai_generated_summary":"The handle Webby originated in Sweden during the late 1990s when a user selected it for a new email account. The name reflected a dual interest in ducks and the internet. Over the following twenty-five years, the name remained a consistent part of the individual's online identity.\n\nA personal website has been revived to feature the original Webby name alongside a modern domain extension. This transition follows years of using modified versions of the handle. The updated site continues a digital presence that was first established during the early years of consumer internet access.","wpai_meta_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,10,27,25,26],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-generic","tag-early-internet","tag-theweb","tag-user-id","tag-web","tag-webby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webby.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}