In the years between 1997 and 1999, Mark had made several websites for himself and the ska band OCG, where he played French Horn. These sites were hosted and edited under the geocities system, a simple website management system that during this time was purchased by yahoo.
For his own site, eventually under the name Bicyclemark's Communique around 1999, he once again used the geocities system. (The address at that time: www.geocities.com/bicyclemark) On this site Mark sought two functions, 1 - To chronical his travels and 2 - a place where he could write opinion pieces reflecting on world news, his primary interest that he felt was badly covered by mainstream media.
Thus began a site where people could browse travel photos, normally from summers in Portugal but also including trips within the US and his study abroad in France during the winter-spring semester of 2000. In addition there was his writing, commenting on conflicts and humanitarian disasters of that time. Although no commenting system existed for individual articles, the site made use of a guestbook where many many people would sign in and react to pieces. The audience was primarly made up of old friends from school and travelling. A small number was just random visitors who stumbled upon the site.
By the winter of 2001 Mark was publishing on this site regularly. With more and more visitors and more and more options and interactive features on the website. It was at this time that someone told him about the existance of blogs and blog writing software. After visiting sites like Camworld, Rebecca Blood, Doc Searls etc.. Mark learned of the different systems (RadioUSerland, MovableType, Blogger). He then signed up, in late 2001 early 2002, for an account on blogger. By the summer of 2002 Mark moved to Amsterdam, and at the same time he had finally figured out how the blogger system could work for him, and Bicyclemark's Communique became an official blog with an audience of around 20 readers per day, publishing every other day and having a mixed focus of travel stories and news commentary. This was also the time where bicyclemark.org became the home of this blog.
In late 2004, after almost 4 years of reading blogs and getting accustomed to more complicated html and php coding, Mark moved bicyclemark.org off the blogger system on onto wordpress.