My Personal Website is Back!

According to the Whois records, I’ve own the domain “mckinleytabor.com” since September 12, 2001. I know this date to be inaccurate, because I remember EXACTLY what I was doing on September 12, 2001, and it wasn’t buying domain names… But in any case, I’ve had this domain for a long time, paying $200 a year back in the mid 1990s for it.

The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine has a snapshot of it from December of 2003, but there are no images, and looking at the code, I think it was just were I had pointed the domain to a website for a company I owned back then…

The next meaningful snapshot comes from 2004, when the page was all black and looked a bit like this…

Thankfully, I’ve grown up A LOT since I published that racist trash. But oddly, I’m not completely ashamed that this older version of me exists online. I think it adds to my creditably when I say “Yes, when I was a child I was a full card carrying Christian Republican Asshole. Now that I’ve grown up, I’ve put away childish things and have become a liberal adult. I broke free from the cycle of hate, and you can too.”

By 2006, I had shifted into full consulting mode…

By 2008, I had started using WordPress, but still was a little too enamored with the color black…

(I think I may have backups and dumps from this old version of wordpress, and I may republish some of these old posts here on my new site)

I’m sort of sad that this version of my wordpress site wasn’t preserved better. I remember having an AWESOME Mac/Apple Theme back in 2010. I gave up on “black” and moved into my Skeuomorphic phase…

 

Here we are in 2019, and I’m relaunching. I wanted a place that I could gather together my work from various sources. For over 20 years, my life had been my work in Information Technology. I had hobbies, but they were almost always related to computers and technology, so I folded them into my work. However in the last 5 years, I’ve found myself paying more attention to other things. My family is older and I’m a little less private about it. I’ve taken on greater leadership roles in Rotary International and Rotary Youth Exchange. But I’ve also discovered that while my work is very important to me, it’s not the only thing in my life that gives it meaning. 

That is what this website is going to be, a nexus for me to publish all aspects of my life. Not just work stuff, but also family, Youth Exchange, and just anything I find interesting and want to share, document, and catalog.

I’m also NOT going to be using social media as the container of my work. I’ve been publishing rants and musings on Facebook for years, but I’ve come to realise that I don’t want my life locked up in any one social media platform. I can publish here, and then share these posts into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, etc, and still keep control over my data.

So please, like, share, subscribe, blah, blah, or don’t. It’s less important that you consume what I create than it is for me to create it. I don’t need validation or approval. I’ve been shouting into the void my whole life, and very few times have I ever felt like the void cared. There are people whose opinions matter to me, but otherwise, if you don’t like who I am, what I say, or what I believe, all I can offer to you is a very heartfelt, “meh”.