Vallentyne.com is 15 years old (sorta) today!

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While doing some poking around on the blog, I realized that Jan 7, 2003 is the oldest post in my WordPress database.  That’s kinda nifty, but it also makes me feel old.

The first wee post to

That’s the oldest entry in the database, but the website actually started as just plain old HTML, no content management system at all.  It was ugly.  Fortunately the WayBack machine provides a look:

Yeah, no idea what I was thinking there.

But the /Family site used Blogger shortly after that, which looked a bit better:

Back then we had lots of participation, not just posts by me…. (this was pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter).  There was some good stuff on there, actually.  You can read them for yourself here.

One particularly pithy one is this Alison Gibson original composition, which is surely worth something now.

Labels and napster and fortune dot com
Lawyers and rapsters and good ideas gone wrong
A user’s agreement that 10 pages long
When all I wanted was to buy one frickin song
Yeah that’s what you get for your Commie ideals
Face it man, everyone lies cheats and steals
Take your gripe to the national court of appeals
If you’ve got a problem with these amazing dealsIt’s wireless, digital slick plug ‘n play!
Hurry, you need it, buy now and don’t pay!
NO INTEREST, NO PAYMENTS, sign up today!
Mastercard accepted, click Submit and OK!Whoa what the fuck happened to me just now?
I think I bought a cellular phone somehow.
All I wanted was Cougar’s “Blood on the Plow”
Not to feed the bloodthirsty corporate cash cow

But that’s what you get for your Commie ideals
Face it babe, everyone lies cheats and steals
Take your best shot and see who squeals
We bet you can’t afford the court of appeals

 Now that’s a song that still has relevance right there.
Blogger worked for a while, but then I went to MovableType since I was running this on my own servers at home and it was so much easier to do it that way.
But, even these posts aren’t actually the oldest bits that existed.  No sir, if you dig a bit more, you can find this:

So, while my memory doesn’t recall, it seems that the first thing I put on the Internet at this location was on May 27, 2002.  Something about a kid being born.  :-)  That page is pretty funny to read through now, wow.  I was just editing HTML by hand back then, so it’s really, really ugly.

So there you go.  A tour of the blog’s past, and it’s not even the first time I have written one of these posts, because after 15+ years you kinda forget.