We’re nearing the point where the Third Iteration of RoadDave is about done. For those of you who have followed the blog, you know some of its’ history, but for those who don’t, here’s the condensed version:
There is/was a website called whatthefuck.com and when a colleague found it online, we determined that we had to write for it. After all, where else could you get an email handle of smitty@whatthefuck.com? It was priceless. We wrote a few posts, some of which were almost good, then work got in the way and we stopped participating. The stuff is still up and you can see it here: RobAndDaveAndLife
I worked for a company out of Bellevue, WA that saw me travelling extensively around the US for weeks at a time. Load up the suitcase and hit the road for a month, two months, or the record, fourteen consecutive weeks on the road. I didn’t get home much and didn’t have a way to stay connected with friends. Hell, I didn’t know where I was going to be more than two weeks ahead. At the time, if you had a hotmail account, you could have a ‘personal website’ with Microsoft that they would host on their servers.
Blogging didn’t actually exist, but a frequently updated website was possible, so that’s what I created. I’d post stories from the road, observations, photos and various other writings in some attempt to keep friends and family sort-of in the loop about where I was, what I was doing and what was going on around me.
That was the original RoadDave and it started in November of 1999. You coded html directly in Notepad and had to define damn near everything without the benefit of even simple plugins for Word. Front Page didn’t exist when the first RoadDave started.
The second iteration was four or five years ago, when Microsoft gave all us hotmail monkeys something called Live Spaces. If you had one of the Microsoft personal websites, you got dumped into the chronosynclastic infindibulum and were invited to rebuild from scratch. I ported some of the early writings over to Live Spaces, but not all of them, simply because it takes time and effort.
At Live Spaces, RoadDave continued to evolve and as the travel cut back to sustainable levels, I could actually work on some of it, putting a fine shine on the brain turds that pass for my writing.
In the meantime, the concept of ‘blogging’ reached the media event horizon of their ADHD reality. I swear there were blogs for the household toaster oven, or Kelly’s Right Nut, the blog of some lad’s right testicle, that suddenly had the urge to overshare. Fortunately most of these things have fallen into disuse or have ported to ‘social media’. Shit My Dad Says, a one-time Twitter feed, is now a first-season TV series that is about as funny as ingrown hairs on your taint.
A few weeks ago, I got a message that Live Spaces was very graciously offering to move us to WordPress. Ostensibly for better customer service, but in reality, Live Spaces was a massive flop and MS wanted rid of the overhead of hundreds of thousands of non-revenue generating blogs that take up bandwidth, rack space and tech support time. Fair enough. Which explains why we’re here now, as WordPress has the willingness to support actual blogging with tools that work, techs that give a damn and some kind of way to turn a profit out of it. Good for WordPress and a “Feh!” to Mothership for the half-assed support.
So what does the future hold here at WordPress? I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, so how can I predict the future? All I know is some kind of RoadDave will continue, with some kind of writing and hopefully some folks who stop by, read some and move on. It’s not a movie or a book or an online arcade. It just is.
Thank you.
RoadDave 