{"id":573899234,"date":"2026-08-05T20:09:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T00:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573899234"},"modified":"2026-08-06T17:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T21:11:10","slug":"happy-birthday-to-the-website-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2026\/08\/05\/happy-birthday-to-the-website-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday to the website"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two things started within 367 days of one another. On August 4, 2003, while reading a lot of Salam Pax (who may work for UNICEF now?) and Raywat Deonandan<\/a> (who is definitely at the University of Toronto) and a local guy named Terry Oglesby and a few of the newfangled political blogs<\/a>, I started a blog myself. It was going to be bad, I knew it was going to be bad. I thought it might get better. (And 23 years later the jury is still out.) But you know what? I had free time and no money and I needed a cheap hobby.<\/p>\n

On August 6, 2004, some friends at work, most notably Brian McAlister, (now at Advance Local) convinced me to drop a few bucks on an actual URL because I had free time and just a few bucks. <\/p>\n

Spending money is always tough, but I was sick of temporary sites and pop-ups and losing control of what my three visitors saw when they remembered to visit. I knew what I wanted, somewhere I could put some things from time to time, and some place I could play with coding from time to time, some place without ads. <\/p>\n

But we must back up. A college buddy of mine, Stephen Kiser (now an economist and professor), sold me a line about how if I learned some HTML I’d add $10,000 to my salary. I was in undergrad and believed him because he was a bit older than me and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. So I spent a summer in college teaching myself how to code, and found that there was something about the process that was satisfying. I never got great at it, but I never wanted to be a computer scientist or a backend developer anyway. I was this other thing. I was the person who could write both HTML and AP Style. There was exactly no one else like that around when I graduated college. In everything else in his life, Kiser might have been right, but I’m still waiting on that extra cash. Though, writing in, or dabbling in, code figured into every job I had in those early years.<\/p>\n

Here’s a screen grab of what the site looked like in 2006 (just the second or third version of the site). <\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

I like sharp, clean design. I was trying to write that with as little code as possible, just for the challenge of it. I was editing the photos by hand, and in probably the hardest way possible in 2006. Because I always got bored with images — that hasn’t changed — I would regularly update them. <\/p>\n

The general way I display the site has changed. I have the front page, of course, with all of the buttons, and most everything else I put through here, or just store on a hidden page deep within the recesses. The traffic has changed, a little. That first August I had 3,670 visits. Now I get about 200,000 a month, for some reason. Some of that is bots and various bits of code, sure, but there are a lot of people in there. May of this year was the biggest month of the site’s history, and what people saw the most that month was one of the cats being silly. Perhaps later this year the 10 millionth visitor will swing through. I wonder what will bring them in. There’s only 22 years of the things that interest me that might catch their eye. <\/p>\n

This has been, and remains, a hobby — a place to ramble on about whatever has caught my interest, a place to memorialize photographs and other files, and the occasional thing I am fortunate enough to post elsewhere. While websites have taken a hit in popularity because of the dopamine that sits inside the walled gardens of social media, I didn’t start this to try to attract crowds. Still, it amuses me that, so far this month, folks from Belgium, Great Britain, Japan, and Canada have been on the site. Germany, Brazil, India, and other nations, too. One person, each, from Andorra, Anguilla, Bahamas, Iceland, Maldives, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have been here. And you, wherever you are at. I’m glad you’re visiting what is, ultimately, a semi-casual, personal site. <\/p>\n

I don’t know why you’ve come here, but I am grateful that you came back. I hope you’ll come back again. <\/p>\n

Tomorrow, we’ll be checking in on the kitties, I’ll ramble on about school work, fret over this and that, and more.<\/p>\n

Thanks for being a part of this. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two things started within 367 days of one another. On August 4, 2003, while reading a lot of Salam Pax (who may work for UNICEF now?) and Raywat Deonandan (who is definitely at the University of Toronto) and a local guy named Terry Oglesby and a few of the newfangled political blogs, I started a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,6,9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573899234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-memories","category-site","category-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573899234"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573899239,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573899234\/revisions\/573899239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573899234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573899234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573899234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}