Guess who's back. Back again. It has been exactly 15 years since I last blogged on SideshoViD.com. I've been thinking about starting it up for a while now but decided to wait for this anniversary, because ... well, no real reason.

For the past 15 years, I've had some sort of "closed" message on the home page saying that what killed my blog was the rise (and subsequent fall) of social media. Blogs weren't in vogue and I wanted to be sharing on whatever social media platform du jour would get me the most likes and comments. It was fun! But now, social media has become a cesspool boomer misinformation highway. It's caustic and I really want no part of it anymore. But I was finding myself missing over sharing the minutia of my day. Hence, the rebirth of the blog.

While it is the same SideshoViD.com you always loved, there are a few key differences. First, I migrated to a WordPress CMS. I had been paying like $30/mo for decades to Earthlink just to host these few HTML files. I've learned a LOT about that kind of stuff since then and realized that was dumb and I could just be hosting it myself for like $3 instead. I was just going to copy and paste the files to a new server, but I also had ambitions of making a coffee table book out of all of my entries. You can do that with a database like WordPress, but not with the antiquated GreyMatter system I had installed in the early 2000s. It was also so old that there was no such thing as a migration path. So, I did what any reasonable person would do and started cutting and pasting one entry at a time, one comment at a time, adjusting the time stamp. It took about 3 years of inconsistent effort, but then it was done. I shut down Earthlink and reaped the savings.

Then I decided I wanted to shut down all of my social media accounts, but that WAS my blog for the years 2010-2023, so I didn't want to lose that history. So, I did what any reasonable would would do and started cutting and pasting one entry at a time. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I got the whole shebang, here for your archival purposes. I'll play with the format, but for now you can read my newest most recent posts, but also enjoy a blast from the past with "This Day in History" just below.

Another change I made is to wipe all evidence of this site from Google search results. You see, I'm a bit of an SEO expert now which means I know all the ways to prevent being found. That should assuage some of your fears about these stories resurfacing. I've also implemented my own proprietary redaction capabilities and redacted all of your last names, or personally identifiable information. So, fear not, you should not be showing up on any Google searches and being denied new jobs because of the transgressions of your youth. If you see anything else you'd like redacted let me know. What's great is, I can still read it, but nobody else can.

So there you go. This blog is now more my own personal diary you can read if you feel like it instead of an attention whoring cry for help. Although, it would be wild, WILD, if anyone of you were still checking. I'm going to try to enable comments, and we'll just have to see if I get 15,000 spam comments in the first 7 seconds of publishing or not.

So let's do this. SideshoViD.com the next generation. Obviously we have much to cover in my life over the past 15 years, but we'll get to all that in time. Excelsior!