“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”

Thanks WordPress, happy to be here, and pleased you’ve stopped being emo and installed properly. WordPress 2.7’s spiffy new admin backend is great, but seriously Mullenweg, get rid of the “Hello Dolly” plugin already. You’re venture-backed now, no time for silly sample plugins.

It’s been a strange, interesting, and exciting 20 months in Vancouver thus far, and despite working as a blogger, going to a blogging conference, hanging out with bloggers, and generally being identified as a blogger, I’ve done essentially no writing for myself. I’m now making the effort to break that pattern. Looking back at the blogger Greg of 2001, I admire and envy how open and free I was with writing. Writing was simpler when your friends are the only ones that read it. However, there’s no shortage of material that I’m comfortable sharing here with the People, the Googles, and the Permanant Record of History, so I can never use the excuse that I don’t have anything to say.

GregCorp doesn’t look like much now, but there’s a long history to it (which I will excise from the Internet Archive once I’ve had the chance to archive it locally).  I first moved out of the Geocities ghetto and acquired the domain in 2001, when I was in Grade 8. Initially I operated it in a “web log” format, as was growing in popularity at the time, through manual HTML updating. Later I moved it to the Blogger service, pre-Google acquisition, which at the time worked by generating static files on their server and FTP’ing them to your server, a novel solution for the masses at the time. Further later, I moved it to WordPress.

For a future post series, I think I’d like to go back through the archives and bring forward the gems. Some intriguing bits of Greg ephemera between all that bad HTML, to be sure.

I think GregCorp was too attached to my past in Edmonton to feel like a web home now that I live in Vancouver. There was never an actual GregCorp corporation (a popular misconception); for a while I might have thought there could be some day, but the nature of modern business is that you never hold on to anything for too long, so it’s silly to name companies after yourself. Further, the corporation has become the primary structure of power in our modern times and is renowned for abusing said power. Certainly though, it was cute when I was six and printing “Made by GregCorp Heavy Industries” on the back of computer-generated greeting cards.

So, by the power invested in me by my webhost, I declare gregcorp.com to no longer be the centerpiece of my web presence. I’ll still keep it for a few years at least to redirect web and email. greg [at] gregcorp mail has always been redirecting to gregandrews [at] gmail and will continue to do so until I zone out on the domain renewal and let it lapse.