Happy 3rd Anniversary to the "Ramblings"!

Happy 3rd Anniversary to the "Ramblings"!

Ramblings by Joe Frank, urbanist -- this blog -- began its life on January 6, 2003.

I even made a second posting that day.

In July 2005, about six months ago, I started more-or-less daily postings on the blog, and soon after I made the comments feature a little more prominent, added a counter, and played with the RSS feed.

It's pretty gratifying to see just how many people DO read this blog, and feel the need to respond.

This also reminds me just how long I've been "on the 'Net."

I got my first email address in summer 1996, but I never used it since home internet access was irregular at that point. It was eng360@umslvma.umsl.edu. UMSL VMA is long, long dead.

When I enrolled at UMSL in fall 1997, I got a new address: s1021865@admiral.umsl.edu. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I used to carry a Eudora Mail floppy disk for storing messages so I could check it in the computer labs. Nevertheless, that same semester I enrolled in an intro to business computing class, which included some basic HTML training. Hence was born my first web site, probably in November 1997: http://www.umsl.edu/~s1021865. That site, too, is long gone.

Eventually, I migrated that site to a much shorter address, but still on a free service: http://joefrank.tripod.com/. This address is still live, but because Tripod made it really hard to use direct FTP for free rather than their SiteBuilder application, I moved it over to my WashU account in March 2004: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~jgfrank/.

So this blog has spanned the existence of two different hosts for my personal web site. For a couple years, I also volunteered to maintain the Marine Villa neighborhood web site, and since I personally paid for the marinevilla.org domain for six years, I am still the contact.

Over the years, I've accumulated a number of email addresses that are still active and which I check on a more-or-less regular basis:

jgfrank@wustl.edu - my primary account since mid-2003;
jgfrank@stlouis.missouri.org - my primary account from 2001 through 2003;
joefrank@excite.com - my first webmail account, probably acquired in 1998;
mrjoefrank@yahoo.com - a second webmail account, probably started in 1999;
frankjo@umsl.edu - my third and newest UMSL email account, this time as faculty;
frankjo@stlouiscity.com - mostly mailings from City Hall, which I still check sometimes.

So, I guess you could say I'm pretty well-connected. ;-)