There were static site generators and server-side includes and even "bad old" FRAMEs (which were fine at the time; the browser chrome for frames being ugly was

There were static site generators and server-side includes and even "bad old" FRAMEs (which were fine at the time; the browser chrome for frames being ugly was a browser issue that eventually shifted) before blogs if you wanted to keep a personal site with a consistent header/footer pattern. I think blogs took over from personal websites because of the "Living Site" patterns this page describes. The easiest way to keep a website appearing living was to pay for a "Guestbook" or "Forum" script or service. The cheapest way to keep a website appearing living was to have a "History Page" that documented the changes to a website in reverse chronological order. Blogs were sort of the inevitable living merger of the Guestbook/Forum and the History Page: reverse chronological order, interactions and comments, feels like a "living page". I know my blog certainly began as a "History Page" of sorts well before the word "blog" existed or dedicated blog software. (In High School I even wrote my own proto-blog engine that I thought was simply a Forum engine to make keeping my "home page" easily up to date and living.)