Time Travel

As my bio states, I've been a blogger for over 20 years--before blogging was a thing. I referenced it pretty much as my online journal.

One of my first sites was theplanetarium.com, which, looking back, is a pretty stupid domain to go by since it's not at all what the domain suggests.

When I first got online in 1998 AOL was one of the main ways of getting online to the general public. My first screenname was "Stargazrre", based upon one of my favorite songs back then by Mother Love Bone so I guess I figured it would be appropriate for those that knew me to buy the domain and blog off of it.

As a "Web Solutions Engineer", my current career, I use archive.org all the time to reference past instances of websites in the cases that we need to restore, or recreate something that went wrong on someone's website, I find it interesting to go back in time to see how immature I was as a 30-year-old.

A lot of the images don't show up. Back in these days we were creating sites page by HTML pages via DreamWeaver and FTPing everything up--unlike the ease of Wordpress and other CMSs these days. "Revelations" was my blog, although the term "blog" wasn't really a term back then.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010926011249/http://theplanetarium.com/

A lot of the links don't work but that's the nature of archive.org. The forum, message board, "The Cage" links typically work on archive.org.

In around 2002, I ditched theplanetarium.com domain and went with breakingthecage.com. This was my first time living in Florida.

This site focused on more interactivity. Live cam still, but I set the site up so you could log into my computer and remote desktop at will--for as long as I had the remote app turned on (sometimes there were needs for privacy).

https://web.archive.org/web/20020723045141/http://breakingthecage.com/

In the end, that site kinda got me into trouble in more than a few ways. But that's a story for another day.

I ended up moving out of Florida to Pennsylvania and started adding interviews to the site that I found intriguing, typically from people that frequented my message board.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021122181048/http://breakingthecage.com/

"Herb" was a really smart guy. Kinda feel bad that we fell out of touch.

In around 2004 I rebranded to Hate | Spite | Love where I continued to do interviews.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051003222232/http://www.hatespitlove.com/

MySpace eventually came into fruition and it kind of killed blogs because everyone could create a personal "blog" without having to know the ins & outs of publishing to websites.

I didn't see the point, aside from assigning my domain of philipwhuff.com as an IT consultant as a business prospect I spent my time on social media until I later moved to Florida in 2016. With social media in mind there wasn't a lot of motivation to do a blog. To be honest that's a lot less work and you can control who your audience is.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180718043715/https://www.philipwhuff.com/

Now the website is cheydesofblack.com. I always use the term on social media, when I check in, based on the fact that everything in our house is black, and sometimes chrome. Seemed appropriate buy the domain and perhaps consider reverting to the old days and hosting another blog. 'Not really sure how motivated I am, as much as I just like to build things (websites), troubleshoot the issues and fix things, then neglect them, but... we'll see.