Blog history

I thought given all the changes around here it might be good to give a little history.  Nice to have it saved somewhere even if no one cares . . .

• I started blogging in November of 2001.  I thought I had something to say and felt like saying it.  Blogs were the new thing, so I jumped in.  Like millions of others I started on Blogger with something called Ideas, etc. 
• Sometime around March 2002 I started using Movable Type and got my own domain - this one. 
• For the vast majority of the time this has been a political blog with sports, culture, and other subjects broached as well.  Traffic has ebbed and flowed, but at one point I was a mid-level political blogger who had been linked by sites like InstaPundit, Kaus Files, and others
• Over the years the title of this blog has changed from Ideas, etc. to A Nickels' Worth of Free Advice to Kevin Holtsberry Dot Com and to Collected Miscellany and back to Kevin Holtsberry Dot Com.  The URL was always kevinholtsberry.com/blog.html since I had accidentally established that address when I first created the blog with Movable Type.  Since that was the link on people's blogrolls I kept it.
• From January 2006 until October 2007 the site was combined with Collected Miscellany.  CM is a stand alone blog I originally created in October of 2003 to cover books and literature (after a brief foray with an Addicted to Books blog on this domain).  The idea was to leave the silly rants and the link filled posts to the original blog and post more serious reviews, interviews, and discussions on the new literary blog.  At the time I was burned out on the political side of things and decided to pursue my lifelong addiction to books. 
• I certainly posted a lot of content but I am not sure much of it was any more focused or well written than the stuff posted on my personal blog.  The good thing was that it led to free books!  As the years went by I tried to keep both blogs going but the original blog's status was haphazard at best.  Eventually I tired of having two blogs and thought it might be better to just combine the two.  Many links still remained to this address and I had lined up some advertisers, so it seemed to make sense to use it as the one blog.  The goal was to combine the traffic and garner a larger readership. 
• As 2005 came to a close I imported the content and the title from my book blog, redesigned the banner, and started 2006 with just one active blog.
• Technical difficulties soon caused me to change yet again.  IPowerWeb had been a great host for both blogs from the start, but the service deteriorated for some reason and I began to have trouble.  I kept having server errors and could never get an explanation.  Unable to resolve these issues, I decided not to renew my hosting for CM and go with a Movable Type recommended hosting company.  In October of 2007 I revived Collected Miscellany at its original address.  With a new hosting company and a fresh install of MT things worked great.
• Thanks to my lack of technical training, however, I screwed up this domain when I upgraded to the latest version of MT.  The "blog.html" address didn't work very well with the new system.  The whole site was chaos for months as I struggled to unravel the issues. 
• I was still unable to solve the problems with IPower, however, and so I decided to switch this domain as well.  After a nightmare of a transfer process, I finally put IPower behind me and began trying to put this web site back together again.
• I think I have preserved most of the links from the old setup but I am not positive.  Because there are so many links to the blog.html address I set it up so MT posts the front page there as well.  But after all of these changes and problems traffic has crawled to nothing and the search engines barely recognize my existence.  So I am basically starting from scratch.

So there you have it.  A rough and tumble history of this site and the reasons for all of the confusion and difficulties.  Feel free to contact me should you have any questions or concerns.

Kevin