Grand Re-Opening (or "The Same Great Stuff At An Even Better Location")

Welcome to a blog that at long last matches software capability with long-held intent!

And let the record also show that that's my obligatory use of the exclamation point. Not really my style.

I've blogged off and on for years (long before it was actually called "blogging"), most recently picking it up again this past spring, which was conveniently in time for when there was going to be a ton of material on which to blog. This coincided with the announcement by AOL-owned CompuServe, where I've been a sysop for the past five years, of a change in forum software platforms, which was long suspected by us old-timers and did not bode well for the future of that particular communications medium.

Oh, I'm still there. But I also set up my own site, and loaded it with my old blogs and essays, as well as TV and movie reviews. There was just one problem: my blog did not have actual blog software. So I was limited to posting a week's worth of commentary at a time, and finding any one particular morsel, while unquestionably worth the effort, was nonetheless a lot more difficult.

And, of course, without promotion, any such personal site is what they used to (and still might, for all I know) call a "vanity" site.

So, while there are still five months left in the 2004 campaign, and before Dan Rather is tracked down by an angry mob with hissing torches and sharpened pitchforks - and at the beginning of a new week - I finally made the move to full-fledged blogdom.

And thanks to the niftiness of hyperlinks, you can click on my profile and get to my personal site to explore that wonderful world of waggery, and my blog page there is linked back to here.

Now that the housekeeping is dispensed with, the fur can resume flying...

-Me, 1,284 days ago

A lot has changed since then, and a lot has stayed the same.  I'm still not given to using exclamation points.  I still blog off and on.  I haven't been an active sysop at RepublicanForum.com worthy of the name since I started Hard Starboard those three years, six months, and six days ago.  But I likely wouldn't have been anyway, since AOL/CompuServe terminated the Forum's contract a year and a half ago, and it's had to sink or swim on its own every since - and, regrettably, has drifted toward the former.

But we here at Hard Starboard still keep flailing along (the details are here, if you're interested, and PayPal took sympathy donations).  My Comcast archive is still there, and our former Blogger home has now joined it in archival status, since we have five times too many posts there to migrate over here.  But we link to it on the right-hand sidebar for those who wish to lose themselves in a wealth of witty, insightful, if woefully underpublicized commentary on the events of the era.

Hopefully it will keep bringing you back here for more of the same.

Time permitting, of course....