This blog used to be good. I found funny writing, I found epic fiskings of stupid homeschool related posts, I found insightful and snarky writing about baseball, and 80s metal; and I found lively engaging conversations in the comments.

I wonder if I could ever get that vibe back here?

http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/toontalk/2012/02/08/caption-contest-156-finalists/

If you don’t think mine is the funniest, vote for it anyway Voting ends at noon on Friday 2/10.

Thank you for your support.

2/14 update: I won!

This is a graph of O’DonnellWeb traffic, going back to 2005 when I first started using Google Analytics.. The high water mark was March 2006 – with almost 10,000 visitors. It’s been 10-15% of that throughout 2011. I suspect most personal blogs would show something similar. On one hand, it’s kind of depressing. On the other hand, if you had told me in 1995 when I started this that almost 1000 people would ever check in monthly, I’d have danced a jig.

I was averaging 1200 or so a month through May, when it nosedived to about 800 a month. Wasn’t that when Google made the big changes to the algorithm? Interestingly though, incoming search was still my #1 source of traffic, just edging out Facebook referrals.

The story of how O’DonnellWeb came to be. (This is an edited repeat post, because I’m lazy that way.)

It was a cold and windy one, that night of Dec 31, 1995. OK, actually I have no idea if it was cold or windy. What I do remember is that my wife was 7+ months pregnant with out daughter, so we were not going anywhere to celebrate the passing of the year. She retired to bed well before midnight, leaving me alone with a computer and a lot of homebrew. That was a recipe for mischief.

Being the geek that I am, building a web page seemed to be a great way to spend New Year’s Eve. In fact, I decided that I wanted a page online that year. Armed with nothing more than Notepad and Netscape 1.0 on a Windows 95 machine, I set off the figure out how to build a web page. It really wasn’t that difficult. The number of HTML tags back then was very limited, and I was able to look at the code on IBM.com and a few other sites to figure out how it all worked. Several hours later it was nearing midnight and I was ready to launch my first site. I read the scarce documentation available and deduced where exactly on the server I needed to FTP my file.

It didn’t work. The file was there, but I got a You are not authorized error when trying to access the page on my 14.4 modem. It was probably about 3 AM when I finally figured out the arcane syntax of the Unix CHMOD command and made the site available to the world. However, technically I was online by midnight. This would not be the last time I spent 3+ hours figuring out a single Linux command.

That original page has been lost to the mists of time, or something. However, it did look a lot like this.

I bought the ODonnellWeb domain in 1998. I’m not a digital pack rat. I don’t have copies of all the old sites. If you are interested, Archive.org seems to have me covered from early 1999.

That first silly web page had a surprising impact on my life. Several months later I parlayed my rudimentary web skills into a job with a tech start up, and 16 years later the Internet is still paying my bills.

2002: We learned our (then) six year old daughter had 1337 skills. I wrote a blog post about PureSim baseball, which led to Mike Masnick leaving a comment about Out of the Park Baseball. Mike and I became friends, and I eventually ended up working for him at Techdirt for a year.

2003: I planned the Great American Baseball Roadtrip. We did it exactly as planned a few months later.

2004: I foreshadowed my interest in college issues. I installed my first wiki. These days I’m using Zim Wiki, which is a desktop wiki for Linux. I sync the files to Dropbox so I can sync across multiple computers (and operating systems) if I need to. I published my BBQ rules.

2005: The Homeschool Blogger Beach Campout. I’d say more, but the statue of limitations…

2006: I tried out for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I didn’t make it. I was thinking about the good old days of setting the VCR to tape Friday Night Videos on TBS while I slept.

2007: Our basement flooded. I fisked a homeschooling paper written by a law professor.

2008: Up The Irons!

2009: We were talking about flow.

2010: I posted my 5000th blog post here. I didn’t notice until two weeks later.

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O’DonnellWeb: Not everything Chris O’Donnell (no relation) posts up here has to do with homeschooling as a father, but it still makes for an informative read all the same.

via 50 Best Blogs in the Unschooling Movement | Online College Tips – Online Colleges.

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The Management

So the site within a site is at design.odonnellweb.com. Let me know if you find any glaring errors.

If you are curious about the technical details….

The design page is simply a custom page template using a query to pull only one category (and it’s children) to the sub site. I tried to do a conditional statement in the header.php file to load the appropriate header, but it wasn’t working. So for now it’s sort of a hack job with way too much manually coded stuff in the page template. I’ll fix that someday. Maybe.