Well, I’m back.
J.R.R. Tolkien used those words to end The Lord of the Rings but having started and deleted this post twice now I think I’ll just borrow his words and get the beginning out of the way. I have been building Websites since 1996. But for some reason it wasn’t until December 2005 that I decided to set up an actual “blog”. I named it “The Semi-Official Blog of Michael Martinez” because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just felt it was time I figured out how people who didn’t hand-code their Websites went about publishing content on the Web. And for convenience’ sake I put the blog on Blogspot.
I closed down Michael-Martinez.blogspot.com in January 2007 because I did not like changes Google made to the system. I eventually archived the old articles on Michael-Martinez.com but I always intended to create a new blog. I just didn’t find the time and energy to do that for 7-1/2 years.My excuse was that I needed to manually repost all the old articles into a new blog. I didn’t want to do it. But time has flowed by and my friend Randy Ray finally convinced me to do something with the site. It was not mobile-friendly and year-by-year degrading into a much less interesting site.
Over the past few weeks I have been quietly working on the new site. I am not happy with the front page but it will do for now (hopefully not for the next seven years). I put the blog on this subdomain. And I reread every old article because I knew I didn’t want to put them all back on the new site. So now you’ll only find the best 85 articles from the set I wrote between December 2005 and January 2007. I thought they were interesting (in some cases even funny), and I figure if I still want to read something I wrote two years later it must be okay. If I’m still happy to read it almost 8 years later it must be even better.
I don’t like making promises about new Websites because I never keep the promises. Writing on a schedule is not easy and, unfortunately, I have a lot of writing commitments. So anything I publish here will be sporadic at best. That could mean you’ll see three articles in a day, a week, or a month. Or I might go three months without writing something here.
Here are a few of my favorite old articles. I don’t know what I’ll write next, but if you’re curious about what I used to publish on my “semi-official personal blog”, these are very good (in my humble opinion) and should keep most people’s interest for a while.
Random Topics
- The Balrog of Moria
- Do You Know the Shoe Shine Man?
- What Makes a Good Story?
- Why I Do Not Call Government Agencies
- How We Lose Our History
- Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq After All
- When You Ring My Bell …
- Salsa Music and Cha Cha Songs
- From a Gentle Seed We Shall Make a Mighty Tree
- Bass Fishing: A True Story about Grandpa Bass
- How to Steal the Planet Venus and Make It Your Own
- Dancing With Stars … In Your Eyes