Daddyo.com as it appeared
10 years agoIt’s human nature to chop the world into neat decade demarcations, and with the September 11th media feeding frenzy as a backdrop, I recently realized that it’s been 10 years now since I converted Daddyo.com over to being a blog.

As is the case with all our lives, much has changed in the past 10 years. In the fall of 2001 I had my dream job at Borders.com where I was able to combine my music career with my passion for Internet technology. When the fatally short sited Borders CEO decided to hand our website over to our arch competitor Amazon, I brazenly predicted that in 10 years Borders would be dead. Last weekend Carrie and I ventured to Borders store #1 here in Ann Arbor for what will be the last time ever. Little did I expect that my pronouncement from a decade before would actually come to fruition and that the handing over of Borders.com to Amazon would truly be the point at which the once mighty Border started to die.

10 years ago my two children were still small and actually did what I asked them to do. My daughter was entering fifth grade and her little brother was entering second grade. Standing next to each other in the photo I always took on the first day of school, she had a good four inches on him. Now my daughter is entering her junior year as a drama student at NYU and my son is a 6’3″ senior in high school. Needless to say, he towers above his sister and everyone else in the family.

It was in August 2001 that I transitioned the dormant domain that had once been home to my web design consultancy to life as a blog. Started on the cusp of life before wartime, it was an interesting time to start communicating to the world via a blog. Daddyo the blog gave me a platform to pontificate with posts on topics as heavy as the American military actions that were on the horizon, and posts that were merely links to cool sites that caught my eye.

10 years ago Daddyo the blog gave me the ability to share with my friends and strangers alike, not only what I thought, but what I was listening to and reading. It felt like pretty cool stuff. Years before social networking would transform our lives, the blog was my own personal social squawk box where I could both talk to my friends and take down a vendor who I felt had done me wrong.

With Facebook at the center of the online communication universe for my family and friends, it’s worthwhile asking whether blogging is still a valid tool in the personal communication tool belt. The answer to that one is an easy yes!, blogs still play a vital role. Facebook and other social tools are perhaps the best place to broadcast tidbits – quick thoughts and cool websites, but a blog is still an amazing platform for long-form communication. It’s a tool where you can communicate more than 140 words at a time, it’s a place where people come looking when they want to hear your written voice.

While these days Daddyo the blog is mostly a home for my podcast Broadcasting From Home, it’s still a communication platform I cherish. It’s my own little sandbox where I can talk, broadcast, and play to my heart’s content. Soon I think I’ll start a series of posts on my favorite things, so y’all come back now, ya hear.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here on Daddyo. Brother John will tell you it’s because I am spending my time on Facebook instead. (Dare I mention that Brother John has not posted to his blog since last November?), But while Facebook is a big distraction, that’s not the reason for the hiatus.. After keeping this blog moving along for eight years now, I just decided to take a little break. But now I’m back. For those of you who are new to daddyo, hi, my name is Scrappy, what is yours? To my regular readers (and both of you know who you are), hold on to your hats, I’m planning on posting here on a regular basis again.

One of those aforementioned regular readers is my dear friend Ed. Ed is not only a great friend, but a prolific poster of comments here on daddyo as well. Just yesterday I read the first entry on Ed’s very own blog, The Edroom. Reading through his words, I thought to myself, “this is cool, I should start writing a blog myself.” So spurred on by Ed, the musical boy genius, I’m back.

As to today’s post title, it dawned on me that in March, Daddyo.com turned 13! That’s right, my domain has reached its difficult pubescent years. Expect some awkward and self-conscious posts from the now teenager. Oh, and I’m also thinking of having Daddyo try growing one of those wispy teenage mustaches.

Some you might have noticed that the site was down for a week or so – sorry about that. I was doing an upgrade to the blogging software that runs the site, and I somehow got FUBARed.

I know not having daddyo around might have proved traumatic to some of you. If you’ve been hurt in any way as a result of the downtime, let me know and I’ll try to personally make it up to you.

Amazingly enough, a whole decade has passed since Daddyo.com went live. During those early days of the commercial web, I was running a one person webs shop specializing in setting up sites for musicians. Working long hours in the basement while learning the intricacies of Photoshop 3, I built the first sites for Garnet Rogers, Lucy Kaplansky The Ark (Ann Arbor’s legendary music venue), Oasis Recording and Cantoo Records among others.

My days as one person shop were mercilessly short and although I soon went to work for a large web firm here in Ann Arbor, I continued to do jobs on the site throughout the rest of the 90′s. Sadly, daddyo.com sat unused for a couple of years until I decided to jump into the then fledgling world of blogging and in 2001, the daddyo.com site as we know it was born.

It’s quite embarrassing to look back at that first version of the site. In those early days, I thought that textured backgrounds were the be-all end-all as were animated gifs. Thankfully those days are long gone.

A ten year anniversary seems a good time to look backwards while discussing the changes in the web during the past decade while casting an eye towards Web 2.0, which is now hitting critical mass. But I’m not here to write that essay, I’m just laying here in bed trying to get this post up before midnight.

From looking through the logs, I see that for some reason, lately I’ve been getting lots of International traffic. In a short time early this morning, the logs showed visitors from:
Kyrgyzstan
Sweden
Istanbul, Turkey
Macerata, Italy
New Zealand
Japan

The interesting thing is that most had no referring link, meaning they didn’t get here via search engine. Clearly there is a great need for Rev. Scrappy throughout the free world. =D

Every now and again I like to go and check what search terms lead people to daddyo. Below are some of the search terms that got folks here today:

circuit city hours of operation
adam dunn charges pitcher
russland town
haitiian food
northern lights wallpaper
volovan 2005
lance bass jewish
james howard kunstler queens
pat metheny group encores download free
scrappy mcgowan
the mighty quinn and download
dar williams hudson valley town
hipster pda stupid
kasiah
children in surgery and humor
hot dog daddyo.com
make bluelight use firefox by default

Between my recent trip back to New York, the fact that my hosting company has been under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack, there’s been nothing posted for a while. In fact, the site’s been down all together for a number of days.

Since things have been sporadic at Daddyo lately, I figured I’d use this time to switch hosts, so Daddyo.com might go down at any time only to reappear at a new and faster hosting company. Wish me luck.

Due to technical difficulties so numerous that they’ve made my hair turn gray, the site was down for the past few days. I’ve spent hours getting things going again. There’s nothing like the fear that you’ve lost 3 years worth of posts in one fell swoop.