The Snyder News Network leaves my bookmark list this week as surprisingly as it entered.

I was a freshman at Ole Miss eight years ago when Drew – of whom I knew only as the guy who ran for ASB Senate with campaign flyers parodying Absolut vodka ads – first told me about his Web site. The first sight of it shocked me. Keep in mind what your typical personal Web page looked like back in 1999 – usually a lifeless white background with occasional 256-color images and text written solely in varying sizes of Times New Roman.

SNN was anything but typical. It looked like a special project from ESPN.com or something. The design, customization, and even the ripped-off CNN logo were impeccable. “I think Snyder has a lot of time on his hands,” a classmate of mine later observed.

But it was the content that kept me coming back. It was hilarious. I must have called three or four people to tell them about SNN on the day it reported Granville Engle’s near-death experience with Romaro Miller’s SUV. By combining light-hearted satire littered with 1990s pop culture references centered toward his late-teens/early 20s Ole Miss audience, Snyder created a sensation unmatched by few other phenomena at that time in that place. When I worked on his student body presidential campaign in 2002, I looked up his site statistics and learned that SNN had tallied some 2 million visitors. Most corporate Web sites would kill for such turnout.

But for all of Snyder’s active efforts toward keeping SNN fresh, his greatest achievement was a passive act – the creation of Monty’s Message Board. But unlike other message boards of the day, discussion on SNN’s message board was greatly influenced by other content on the site. The whole setup was very blog-ish, but years before blogs hit the mainstream.

Of course, in his never failing innovative fashion, by the time blogging went mainstream in 2004, Snyder had been writing one for months. His efforts directly led to the creations of several other blogs, including mine, which I’ve written for nearly three years and which contains some 2,200 posts. Assuming I’ve spent five minutes on each post, this means I can directly blame Drew for the loss of nearly a week and a half of my life. Thanks a lot, Snyder.

SNN has had its highs and its lows, but its existence has eased countless study sessions and workdays. Just knowing that each hour held the promise of a new post, or at least an asinine comment or two, made getting down to business a little easier.

SNN’s departure leaves me and several dozen other loyal readers without that welcome distraction. Most of us have left Oxford by now, if we ever went through Oxford to begin with, but SNN continued to provide glimpses back at the foolishness and camaraderie of college. Maybe that makes SNN’s departure just another part of growing up.

Either way, it’ll be a sad day the first time I absent-mindedly click my “Snyder News Network” bookmark and come upon an Albanian Viagra salesman’s illegal outfit instead of this blog. SNN’s exit won’t go down in history, but it will mark a day when all of us began showing up to work under the sad realization that a favorite distraction has permanently returned to the toy box.

If that’s adulthood, then give me SNN any day.