Hey, remember when I started this site?

Yeah, that was ten years ago. Here’s my first ever journal entry, in which I talk about fascinating topics such as digital cameras, high school reunions, and Homicide. I don’t know why the formatting is screwed up and frankly, at this point, I don’t care.

Back then, I had a sidebar where I posted links I found entertaining or amusing, and commented on them. Later that year, I spun that off into its own page, which I called a weblog. Who knew?

Happy birthday, Fresh Hell. Like a lot of oldsters, no one really pays attention to you any more. But ah, the memories. (Note: in case you want to relive the magic, not all of my archives made it through the eight million different content management software iterations, so it jumps around a bit.)

I changed my theme because the previous one was something I cobbled together in like ten minutes just so that I could make the page wide enough so that I could embed videos etc. in an effort to bring this blog into 2008, but I never liked the design all that much. This one is much prettier! I had nothing to do with it! I remember in the old days when I would spend days redesigning my blog. Now I just upload a theme and one click and it’s done. I’m not sure which is better, but this is definitely easier, especially since design is not my strong suit.

I’m not totally happy with the text size or some of the spacing, but I’m poking around in the stylesheet, trying to figure it out. Let me know if you see anything broken or weird. And enjoy!

I just installed a new theme for this blog because I couldn’t get the old one was fixed width and it was causing all sorts of layout problems with my new wider main column that I was not smart enough to fix (or didn’t know enough about CSS to fix). So hopefully this one doesn’t look as weird. I’m still tweaking things here and there, but at least things don’t get all shoved out of alignment now. Let me know in the comments if anything looks especially weird and I’ll try to fix it. If you do, please let me know what browser/OS combo you’re using too, because that helps pinpoint the problem. Thanks!

Hi! I just wanted to point out (mostly because I just realized) that I just passed nine years of having a blog. I haven’t finished importing all of my early entries — since I coded everything by hand back then, there’s not an easy way to import everything so it’s all copy and paste, and I’m trying to import both the journal entries and the sidebar blog-style entries, so it takes a while. Anyway, Happy Birthday Fresh Hell!

I just installed Word 2007 because it’s what we’re using at school this semester so I need to know how to use it so that I can help my students use it. Anyway, there’s a publish-to-blog feature and I wanted to see if it actually works. Here goes nothing!

I uploaded some more old journal entries — I’m slowing getting all of 1999 (the first year of my journal when I didn’t use any sort of automated system like Blogger or Movable Type or anything) into this database. You can go back and read them by clicking on the month in the left sidebar. Reading through them I’m struck by two things: first, I was a completely different person back then and second, I don’t know why anyone read my journal because it was BOOOO-RING. Not that it’s super exciting now, but jeez.

And also, I changed it so that you don’t have to register to post comments, although you do still need to put in an e-mail address. If things get too spammy, I might change back, but I’m going to try this for a while because I think having to register is keeping people from commenting as much. That’s what it is right? I know you all have strong opinions! Post them!

I screwed up and didn’t include the register link so that you could leave comments (thanks kristin for pointing that out!), but you should see it now. It’s at the bottom of the right-hand column. I believe it’s a one-time thing, and once you’ve registered once, you never have to do it again for this blog. I know it’s kind of a pain, but the comment spam gets ridiculous and I was spending a lot of time deleting it — this should help prevent it. Thanks and can’t wait to see all your comments!

I’m going out of town for the next week and a half, visiting family and friends. Um, not that you’d notice by my posting levels lately! But if you are trying to e-mail me and not getting a response, that’s why. I’m on break! Woo hoo!

Well, that’s not true. I watched some things, but I’ve also been grading final projects and dealing with freaked-out students. So, no podcast today and possibly not this week — I’ll see how things go.

Just being curious, I tried to find the first ever post on this site today (it’s a little difficult because my journal archives are kind of screwed up) and discovered that I started this website almost eight years ago. It’s Fresh Hell’s birthday in a week and a half! Have any of you been around since the beginning? And check out that entry! Look at the little baby weblog in the sidebar. How cute.