Hello, everyone! It’s been a long time since I kept a regular blog on my worldview. Even though this is my first serious attempt in a while, and the launch of my brand-new-short-and-easy-to-spell domain, I’ll have you know that I’ve been doing the “blog” thing since before the term “blog” even existed.

the First Pages

I forget the exact date, but the original Johnathan McClure Takes Over The Web page (essentially, a list of my interests no more complicated than my basic Facebook profile) went up sometime in 1997, based on some code I learned from my dad’s cousin. Some time thereafter, I summoned up all my powers of HTML coding and developed a frames-based portal I called Johnathan McClure’s WebCenter. It started out at Tripod, but I finally moved it to some real webspace in 2004 (long after I stopped maintaining it regularly). In my first-ever brush with Internet fame, the Dallas Observer interviewed me about my Barney-hating page way back in 2001. Anywho, WebCenter is still at johnathanmcclure.com for the time being.

Political Concerns

Toward the end of my regular updates to WebCenter, I became active in the National Youth Rights Association and a few online discussion boards, particularly Democratic Underground. It was also the heyday of my online postings. But a curious thing happened during my 2004 campaign; the updates halted, and never returned.

the Rise of the Social Networks

Right around that time, actually, one of my friends introduced me to MySpace, and I was hooked by the concept of social networking. Any new blog posts I made started to go there. Over time, the content got more personal, and I needed more outlets. In July ’05, I got a Xanga, more or less for shades of the same content I was putting on MySpace, and I also branched out into LiveJournal, which I’ve used to publish cheesy near-future short stories.

the NEW j5mc.org

After a time, and consternation over certain political prodding I’ve gotten, I decided it’d be good to get back on the horse of current events and opinion. The world is a bit different than it was in 2004, and the blogosphere has found its relevancy. At the same time, my longing to return to such an outlet had reached a head. And then I got it in my head: a new URL, short, simple, totally me. j5mc.org. I’m not sure who started it, but there are some folks that have referred to me as “J5MC” after the fashion of the Jurassic 5.

Well, that’s the story about the blog. On with business.