Happy Anniversary

Tomorrow, September 28, in the year of our Lord 2002, marks the 5th anniversary of my website in some form or another. And since I don’t post on Saturdays right now, I’m going to celebrate today. It all started 5 years ago on a crappy little Tripod site that was started for me by a woman who called herself Sentira. She was the artist behind the original “TheTrenchcoat” picture. So Sentira if you’re out there somewhere reading this, thank you. And since that day I’ve been addicted to making and maintaining my websites.

First, there was “The Lair of TheTrenchcoat” which also contained some of my (ugh)poetry. Then I started writing more, and I split the site in two and had The Lair plus “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” which were two completely different sites. Then Columbine happened, and I landed on the front page of the Washington comPost, so I decided to lie low. I changed the site to “Patrick Black: The Usual Suspect”. Then I changed it to “Suspect’s Symphony of Sychosis”. And eventually, I changed it to “The Written Works of the 13th Suspect”. After a while, I got tired of being a suspect and wanted to be a good guy again. So then I started “Patrick Black’s No Cure for Cancer” which for the first time featured a rant section. Then a friend of mine told me about Namezero which at the time was offering free top-level domain names. So I registered TheTrenchcoat.Org and split the sites up again into “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” and “The Gospel According to Vigilante 13”. Having 2 different names for the same persona didn’t last long, and I changed it to “The Gospel of TheTrenchcoat”. And those two stayed that way for a while. Then I tried my hand at a Real Audio music site called “Radio Free Trenchcoat” so now I had three separate sites. Then in April 2001, I signed up with Xanga and registered the domain name of thetrenchcoat.com. The idea was to have the Xanga site be a portal to my other three sites. That didn’t work out. So I combined “Gospel” and “Written” into “TheTrenchcoat Anthology” under thetrenchcoat.com and killed the music site. Then I found out how to host my own blog and added it to “The Anthology”. I made the blog the front page of the site, which is now what you see before you…”TheTrenchcoat Chronicles”. And in another year I’ll probably be calling it something else.

And I’ve used several different web hosts as well. Tripod, Geocities, WBS/Go.com, Angelfire, Freeservers, 0catch, and V3 Space. And let me tell you, a paid host is the way to go.