Twenty Five Years of Positive Infinity

Twenty-five years ago I received the following notification from Geocities, the free website provider:

Sat Aug 23 13:59:46 1997…

Welcome, DON, to GeoCities Personal Home Page Program!
Please write down or save the following information for future use.

Your Member Name is: penlay.
Your Neighborhood is: Athens/Parthenon.
Your Address is: 4799.
Your Current Password is: ******

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NOTE: WE WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PASSWORD. We have access to the database and can get it at any time. Please be sure not to give it out to anyone else.
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The URL for your Personal Home Page is:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/4799

If you want to change your password use our editor at http://www.geocities.com/homestead/homeprof.html

At this location you can also make all other changes to your account profile, including changing your member name and directory listing.

Some of the very early history of the site–including some of its graphics–is in our “About” page.   A summary of the site after its conversion to a WordPress blog is here.

Twenty-five years is an eternity on the internet.  Many things have changed since this site was started.  The purpose of the site has not: to be a blessing to those who visit, to be informative in a world where it’s too easy to uncritically accept the “pap” that we’re expected to embrace.

It took some time to get a structure put together, but by the time this site migrated to WordPress the basic topical structure of the site was pretty much as it is now; you can see this in the “Categories” list on the left.  Several of its features have been migrated to other sites.  The Bossuet Project has its own site now and the Island Chronicles (my fiction) and the Palm Beach Experience have gone to Chet Aero Marine.  This site was self-hosted from the time it left Geocities until earlier this year, when it migrated to wordpress.com.

At the last anniversary I noted that things were closing in on sites like this.  Most of that censorship has taken place on social media, although some have spilled over into the hosted world.  The corporatist style of mind of those coming up doesn’t bode well for freedom of speech in this country.

When we first moved to Palm Beach, my parents placed me in Palm Beach Public School, whose principal was Clifford Ripley (believe it or not!)  He placed many pithy sayings in the school handbook, one of which was “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday; make each day count.”  God has given us one day at a time; we need to make it count while we are still here.  This blog is part of my attempt to do just that the last twenty-five years; I trust it has been a blessing to you.