My blog is now ten years old. Wow. I started it on a Gateway laptop when I was twenty-five years old and living in Washington, D.C. In other words, in a previous life.
In the beginning
Though my first blog post was written in 2002, I registered the domain rebelprince.com and put up a small website in September 2001. It was a place for a few personal pictures and I would update it weekly with stuff that was going on with me, basically for friends and family. Not quite a blog; more like a newsletter.
The Rebel Prince domain name was inspired by the Rufus Wainwright song, as those years were the height of my Rufus fandom. I still love him now, but at the time he and my fellow Rufus peeps were pretty much the center of my leisure universe: reading the message board, following the Poses tour, etc. It was never a dedicated fan site per se, but I just loved the song so much that it stuck. I later moved the site to jefftabaco.com and intended to change the blog name, but I still find Rebel Prince endearing. So it stays, for now.
Little boxes
I would link to the very first entry, dated January 25, 2002, but as I’ve migrated this blog through three publishing platforms and two domains over the years, like physical moves there is still a lot of stuff in boxes. Back in the day I started on Blogger, and at the time their system did not have separate fields for post titles. (They didn’t have a built-in commenting system either. Imagine that!) I got into the habit of writing daily blog posts made up of unrelated blurbs and made my own subheadings.
Fast forward a few years to Movable Type. I migrated my posts to the new system, which now had title fields. So I had some clean-up to do for these old posts. Over time I started either breaking them up into separate posts or just giving them the same title as the first blurb. In any case now here we are now on WordPress, which I love, and I still have several months of posts in boxes as it were. I’ll get to them someday.
Thank you
Thank you, dear readers, for, well, … reading. Especially you old-school bloggers who have become friends over the years. No doubt I’m blogging less thanks to Facebook and Twitter, but there’s nothing like a blank, open page to get the imagination going. I do love my own little patch of Internet.