Q.who had the first whistle related website?
Our site is now over 3 years old but I know there were sites way before us.
Phil.
Here’s a copy of Dale’s personal page circa 1997. That’s the oldest I know of, but there may be older sites I’m unaware of.
There were a few whistle website before The Tinwhistle Table, the forerunner of Chiff & Fipple. My recollection is that Greg had The Wandering Whistler up before I did. I can’t recall if Pat Ashley had his up before mine. It’s now gone. Bil McKelty, who’s now mad at me for reasons I can’t recall, certainly had a site up before mine and in fact was helpful to me in getting mine going. There were maybe a couple of others, I think. None of the makers had websites and, of course, there was only a tiny fraction of the number we have now. I relied on Lark in the Morning’s website and House of Musical Traditions to get started learning about what whistles were out there. Of course, I’m still not entirely sure when I started the website. I would think sometime in 1996.
Dale
Dale,
I recall Greg being online before you, and that the Whistling Low is similar old as Gregs. I always thought Bil’s site did go over into your tinwhistle table? Pat came in after you and my first recollection of your tinwhistle table is from spring/summer 97 but the webarchive tells it being older.
Brigitte
If mine was up before Dale’s, it was only by a few months…
I put my website up when I found it difficult to get free music on the web.. There were a couple of music sites that served as inspiration, mainly the Virtual Tunebook, which is still up:
http://www.celticmusic.com/cgi-bin/tunes.pl
You can still see some of his influence on my own site, such as the little note icons for whether a tune has a recording. I went through all of the web design fads that thankfully we’re away from: Frames, forced midi music in the background when you come to the site, gif animations, etc.
Anyway, after running across the virtual tunebook, I was pretty inspired. I figured, if I had to buy music, and the music was traditional, then I’d do everyone a favor and put it online for free. At the time, I used a couple of different tools to make the sheet music, which was OK but not really publishing quality. Sometime in 2000 I got Finale, and also moved the code from static html to ASP with a database backend which led to a big quality improvement on the site.
Late 96 or early 97, I put up about 3 or 4 couple-paragraph reviews of whistles, including one that I didn’t like. I got a few email flames for it, which left a bad taste in my mouth. And I knew that I really was a newbie still and probably didn’t really know a lot of what I was talking about yet. But then in surfing around, I found Dale’s site and it was really far more comprehensive than mine on the whistle side of the equation, so I figured my problems were solved…there was already a site out there that handled whistles, and I handled sheet music, so I just wiped off my reviews, made a link to Dale’s site, and just went on about my business 
I think I ended up joining the C&F message board around 98 or 99.
I think you’re right that Whistling Low was around before.
Bil’s site wasn’t assumed into mine. I think he just gave it up once C&F got going.
No matter who was up first (er… wasn’t that who on first?.. oops, wrong thread)… I am so glad you folks did what you did when you did it! Otherwise, I might not have been inspired so much to get my whistles back out.
THANKS!!!
There was the old www.jigs-n-reels.com which introduced me to the playing of the likes of Teri KEssler among other old time regulars to the C&F board. was that put together by the same chap behind ‘whistling low’? It’s many years dead now of course…and used to have at least one other url before jigs-n-reels
I put my site up sometime in 2000 and as I remember Michael Burke put his up just before mine.
Have a great New Year all you Chiffsters.
Ronaldo
My site went up in April of 1998, I also have the resources page back in January 1998.
Just for fun, if you want to check out the existing archives on the Internet you can use “The Wayback Machine” that is part of the Internet Archive site:
They describe themselves in the following paragraph:
“Browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available.”
Great way to go back in time… you can start looking at the original Chiff and Fipple Page… check the links at that time to other pre-existing sites…
That was a nice, fun little piece of C&F history… It’s funny how cheezy most web pages were only 8-10 years ago.