15 years ago, on a similarly deary November day, this blog was born.
If failing memory serves correct, the bosses had given me a free domain name when we first signed up for web hosting. I registered cgm13.com, installed Blogger and was off and running. Blogger was in it’s infancy back in 2002 and didn’t have all cool features we now take for granted. You couldn’t give a title to any posts and you had to have a third party add-on for comments. The blog rocked along for a little while and was actually gaining some readership when our hosting company (and holder of the domain registration) shut down with no warning. I was left scrambling to register a new name and get the site up and running again. Hence the .net address and not .com. I also signed up for my own hosting with Dreamhost at the suggestion of The Man. Blogger eventually became popular and pesky to deal with in regards to slow service and outages. So, I switched over to WordPress which offered more features and seemed more stable as it was a self-hosted platform. Supposedly, I was going to able to import the comments from that Blogger third-party add-on. That failed and I lost a couple of years worth of comments, but the site soldiered on. I changed the “theme” of the blog every few months because I could never settle of something I liked. Eventually, readership was up and people were linking to me. That was about the time I did a Robin/Burt Ward theme. The title kinda stuck (because people were actually linking to this site) … and, thus, The Boy Wonder was cemented as this blog’s name.
Over the years, I have met some really cool people because of this site. I have even pissed a few of them off. Such is life, I guess. This blog, and those friendships, helped this small town boy gain a better perspective on the world and feel a little more comfortable in his own skin.
It seemed like almost everyone had a blog at some point. It was “social media” before social media (i.e. Facebook, etc.) actually became a thing. Eventually these new online social spaces overtook weblogs as the place for personal expression. One by one a lot of the people on my blogroll just disappeared. Bloggers that were very active just suddenly stopped updating. It was like those houses where dinner was still on the table but everyone had disappeared mid-meal. It’s kinda sad but change is a part of this crazy thing called life.
There are a few of us old timers still around (including two of my three Blog Daddies). That makes me happy. I took a break for a few years, but I am back at it and hope to continue documenting the events, places, people, eye candy, toys, and movies that make life bearable.
Happy Birthday, Boy Wonder.