Whatever Happened to Pearl Soup?

Whatever Happened to Pearl Soup?

by Marilyn Mackenzie

I've been a member of Pearl Soup for years.  What's that, you ask?  Well, it was a site for people who like to write "pearls of wisdom."  Whatever you shared - prose or poetry - had to have some message, some bit of wisdom.  It couldn't be a poem about sunshine, unless you added some words of wisdom about why sunshine was vital to the soul or something.

I think I joined in 2001 or 2002.  I'm not sure.  I posted regularly for quite a while and ended up being  in the top 5 writers.  We got points for posting articles and for commenting, and as our points grew, we got bumped up on the ladder.  I think I even made it to #2 for a short while.

There were always some wild discussions going.  People who are creative are often...well, opinionated too. 

In more recent years, I visited Pearl Soup only about 5 or 6 times a year.  I did keep some of my writings there, but I rarely added new ones and rarely participated in the discussions (unless it was to defend one of my long-time internet writing friends).

About a week ago, I tried to log onto http://www.pearlsoup.com/ and discovered that it was gone!  Oh, there was a page there with the message, "This site is currently unavailable due to a scheduled database maintenance.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  Please check back later.   Thank you!!!"  But  I have my doubts about that.  The two guys who owned and maintained the site have been absent for a long time.  The spotlighted "Pearl of the Week" and "Pearl of the Month" and other recognitions that used to be regularly updated had not been for a long, long time.

Being curious, I decided to check the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  Have you ever done that?  It's really an awesome tool. 

Here's the list of articles I wrote at Pearl Soup, as listed by the WayBack Machine.  Pearls Written  Most of the links (the ones I checked, anyway) are clickable.  I'm glad, because I think there may be one or two articles that I had saved on a disk that I have misplaced.

While I was at the Wayback Machine, I also checked to see if they had any Boomertowne pages archived.  They did, but the last one was from February, 2008.

If you have never played with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine you might want to do that someday when you're bored.  There are hundreds of pages archived there for Themestream - the very first place that I visited on the internet to share my writings back in 1999.  Sometimes I search those pages trying to find an article I wrote (and stupidly didn't copy on my computer or on a disk) called, "Southern Snowmen."  It may be there, but I've never been able to locate it.  Oh well.  Perhaps one day I'll find the copy I printed out and put in a file (and in a box) somewhere.