blogs – Rebel Prince

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.

I’ve been tinkering under the blog hood (more than actually writing posts, as you can tell lately), and am trying out a WordPress plugin called Wordbooker. At first I was just looking for a plugin to automatically post a link on Facebook when I write a blog post, which this does, but it also can push blog comments to Facebook and pull Facebook comments to the blog, thus keeping them in sync periodically, in either or both directions as one pleases. It can even place Facebook “like” and “share” buttons in posts; I don’t know how useful those will be for this personal and infrequently updated blog, but we’ll see.

At some point last year I quietly installed some other bells and whistles… one is this theme by WooThemes called Bueno, and another is fonts by Typekit. Yay, typography. Also noteworthy is a nifty plugin called WPtouch, which transforms my blog into a pared-down, faster-loading format for smartphones. You’ll see this if you’re visiting on an iPhone, Android phone, BlackBerry, and so forth. I like this plugin so much that I shelled out for the paid version, WPtouch Pro, which among other things includes support for iPad.