Before this blog, I had a website.  Well, it was THIS website.  It was SPLOTCHY DOT COM.

I got my domain in the late 90’s, after playing around with some very bare-bones website experiments on GeoCities and Xoom.

In 1999-2000, I was into writing HTML files in Notepad, then uploading them to my brand new domain.

My website wasn’t a blog.  While I was maintaining the initial SPLOTCHY site I didn’t even know what a blog was. I knew I had things I wanted to say, and things I wanted to  highlight.  So I made a webpage for each topic that I wanted to devote some attention to.

I ran out of things to say, and stopped maintaining my website.  I still had the domain, though.

I was quiet on the web for a long time.  Years later, inspired by my Uncle Joe and his foray into the blogosphere, I started blogging at Blogspot.  I found other bloggers. We commented on each other’s posts, we did mixtapes together, we met up occasionally, usually around Christmas.

And then a couple years after beginning blogging, I stopped again.  A lot of the blogger community migrated to Facebook.  It wasn’t Facebook that ended my blogging career. I think I stopped mostly because I got more active on Twitter, and found new friends there while my source of friends in the blogosphere dried up.

Which brings us to today.  It might change, but I find the whole Twitter community that I felt I once belonged to now withering on the vine.  The friends I used to talk to a lot aren’t around as much anymore.  Call it a casualty of a lack of free time, I guess.  Twitter always seemed to function as a means to fill the empty spaces of a life when one has nothing else better to do.  So now, I guess many of us have moved onto the next best (or simply, just next) thing — the next time-waster.

I like the idea of blogging.  I never stopped liking the idea of blogging.  And now that I don’t feel connected greatly to anyone on Twitter or on Facebook, I feel like talking again.  What I’d LIKE to happen is that I find other bloggers (I know they’re out there), and see another community organically form.  But if it doesn’t happen, hey, I got things to say.

So, I started this blog on the place where I first started 14(!) years ago.  I started here.

My new blog sits on top of the strata of the old site that I abandoned years ago.   I thought as a bit of celebration, and a bit of navel-gazing, I would take different parts of my old website and talk about them over the course of a few blog posts.

So, stay tuned for Hooker Motels.  I think you’ll like them.