ALBj.net is 10 years old today
A little more than 20 years ago—January 1998—I published my first web site, D.T.P. by Lee, as a repository of links about desktop publishing, web authoring, and other topics that interested me. A few years later, I learned a whole more intentional approach to web design and completely rebuilt the site as a result, effectively going from version 1.0 to 2.0.
A few more years later, I no longer felt compelled to maintain the list of links (most of which no longer functioned) and decided to transform the site into a blog. So, January 26, 2003, what began as “Desktop Publishing by Lee” became “Daily Tales and Punditry by Lee,” a.k.a. D.T.P. by Lee version 3.0. Only five days later, January 31, I was fed up with the original Blosxom software I had started with. My friend, Jeff, lent me a hand installing Movable Type, bringing a quick death to D.T.P. by Lee 3.0 and birthing version 3.5. (Sadly, all traces of version 3.0’s existence are vaporized.)
Version 3.x only lasted 14 months. I was getting a little tired of verbally sharing the difficult name, and decided I wanted to start from scratch.
Consequently, in March 2004, I migrated to my brand-new site, Second Initial after a LOT of immensely appreciated help from Raena coding the Movable Type theme. My blogging effort was significantly more substantial, though I do wonder if I was mostly only writing to myself. By 2008, most of us were armed with this new phenomenon called Social Media, and it was quite apparent I was content to do most of my sharing on Twitter and Facebook rather than frequent blog posts.
While I still wanted a place for occasional blogging, I wanted yet another new site primarily intended for indexing all my online activity, be it messages, photos, geocaching, etc. I also wanted a shorter domain that better reflected my name, A. Lee Bennett Jr. Thus, early that year, I registered ALBj.net and, in April 2008—10 years ago today—went live with the first post on my new site.
Its version 1.0 appearance mimicked a Finder window of a Macintosh computer which I was rather fond of, but it always bugged me that it was, in no way, mobile device-friendly. So, two years ago on this site’s 8th anniversary, I set up a whole new theme modernized for easier viewing on mobile devices. Although the theme change made it appear like yet another start-from-scratch site, it was still the same WordPress engine, so all the prior pages and posts remained in version 2.0.
A little more than a year later, I again made significant adjustments to improve access to various parts of the site, but those adjustments were made within the same WordPress theme after the theme’s developer updated it with new features. Part of me wishes I had cloned the theme configuration folder first to save version 2.0’s appearance. Although D.T.P. by Lee version 3.0 seems to have pre-dated the Wayback Machine’s awareness of my site, it does have a record of ALBj.net’s version 2.0 appearance.
In any case, that brings us to its current appearance at version 2.5, and this blog post marking this domain’s 10th anniversary. Although I do still own the other domains, neither get any activity. They’re just archives of what had been there. That makes ALBj.net my longest actively used site many times over.
