About

What this Blog is "About"

There is only one real rule to what shows up on this blog/site hybrid: whatever pops up in my head on a given day has a certain chance of showing up. Sometimes I will heavily post about horror novels, sometimes about horror movies, sometimes about politics, and sometimes about pipe tobacco and tea. I have a wide range of interests, but most boil down to a few basic loci, and I post mostly about those. Looking to your left, now, you will see the rough categories of the site: that is a good summary of the common topics. While this is a "personal" site, it is mostly a personal site in that I post about the things that I think about, moreso than the old personal sites that were mostly about their owner.

If I had to pick the "BIG FIVE", the things this blog is most about are: 1) Horror things, 2) Books, 3) Philosophy and Information, 4) Day to Day stuff, and 5) Huntsville inspired things.

Lots of information about me can be found on the Doug Bolden ...on Himself page.

A Rough History of this Page

circa 1998. The first version of this page shows up, called "Doug's RPG Page". Some basic things are layed out: links are to the left, content to the right, and the overall focus of the page is less about me personally and more about the things I do (at that time, namely RPGs). The overall color scheme is dark, and I use a lot of background graphics (stolen from the net) and there is a feature to play Midi files down in one corner. Though briefly on a now-defunct Center of Excellence in Technology server (South Alabama), the page was quickly moved onto Geocities (Dimension sub-group, I think it was page 9180 or something).

circa 2000. The RPG page is hacked to bits and replaced with a temporary failed experiment called something like Elektronic Portals. The focus is more on console RPGs. The color scheme is atrocious. After a few months, interest in the page failed and I stopped updating. Page still on Geocities.

2003. Page is restarted as "Doug's Page of Doug" on UAH's student website server. I was trying to copy the name of the original page, but missed, slightly. New categories are set up where only one is RPGs. The rest are a wide guess of science and literature and poetry. The color scheme is dark, even darker than before, though I now avoid background graphics. For the first time, hosted my own blog on top of the page itself, though the two were kind of separate. The biggest area, probably by far, was the poetry readings, which got some attention. Some of my literature reviews and discussion also got some hits, for some reason. The page eventually migrates to my own server, and becomes Wyrmis.net.

2004. Wyrmis.net expires and the page goes down. Almost all of my online presence is now on Livejournal.

2005. Wyrmis.com, which revamps the whole thing, comes into play. LJ is still my primary outpouring for personal information to the net, but wyrmis.com allows me to post poetry and reviews and other general comments. Mostly ignored by everyone, including me.

2005-2006. Second blog is started, eventually called Dickens of a Blog though it's original title is Doug's Tea Blog (how creative!). Initial focus on tea is soon expanded to be about tea, books, and pipes.

2007. Tea blog is now defunct, for a couple of reasons. A few sub-blogs have been floating around. Nothing gels. LJ is still big, though now have an account on Myspace and some blog entries are going there, instead.

2008. Moved blog presence entire over to wyrmis.com early in the year. Felt like re-energizing my site. Worked on it for a while and started getting new entries up regularly. My readership, however, was only about 5. Eventually started posting some to LJ and some to the blog, which eventually absorbed Dickens of a Blog as a title.

2009. Worked on things like Feeds around May of 2009. Later on in the year, added comments. Daily readership has went up, but still nothing too big. Facebook is probably the biggest single place for my online presence.

2010. Feeds tweaked to a new "blot" format that integrates short posts, new pictures, and links to longer posts into one system. Comments removed for good, and likely to not return. Returned to LJ and made my Livejournal back to "readable by everyone". Went through and linked lots and lots of old posts from the blog to the various site categories. Altered the side-bar to include new categories, added other functionality to the site, and tried working more on editing old entries and getting a consistent vibe up.