A Decade Of Nonsense: Part 1

The header since early 2007- Design by Kerkove Media

Last year I made mention in my "Rear View" series that I was going to be celebrating ten years of blogging in May of 2005. Well, that's not quite technically correct, as I was doing guest blogging on Jeff Kerkove's blog back in late 2004. The celebration then is starting now and will be ongoing- off and on as I come up with something to say about all of this- through the Summer months. I hope to take some of you back to the days when getting 50 people to look at this deal was considered by myself to be "really amazing" and perhaps give you some insight as to the highs and lows the blog has gone through throughout these years here. Most of all, I want to thank all of you out there that stop in to read. Without you, this is all just blathering into the wind. Meaningless. Nonsense.


Well, maybe there still is some nonsense here! 

Guitar Ted Productions

A bicycle and guitar oriented elixir that some find intoxicating. Others...well, let's just say they are sick of it!

Above is the first, Blogger.com generated header the site used. 

Things started out pretty simply here. I didn't have any real sense of how this medium worked at all. Not that I am a whole lot better now, but at least I know how to post a picture! Jeff Kerkove was instrumental in getting me on the internet. Without his daily cajoling back around 2004, this never would have happened. So, a first, and huge, thank you goes out to Jeff for never letting up on me and finding a way to edge me into the water of blogging by allowing me to sully his page for a bit. That bit of guest blogging was a lot of fun, and it opened my eyes up to something I became, (or maybe already was and didn't know it), very passionate about, namely writing. In fact, I felt compelled to tell stories that, quite honestly, didn't fit the mold of Jeff's then freewheeling banter on endurance training, so along about April of 2005, I started looking into doing my own thing, and how that might work out.

The first design for the blog header, circa 2006, by Jeff Kerkove

Well, obviously April of 2005 was a busy month, as Jeff and I put on our first ever event, Trans Iowa. So, this whole blogging thing didn't get going until I decided to pull the trigger one evening in May of 2005 and there it was! When I set up my template, I chose a Blogger generated one and it asked for a "description of your blog", so I came up with the now infamous "A bicycle and guitar oriented elixir that some find intoxicating. Others...well, let's just say they are sick of it!". Which was ironic, because at the time no one had ever heard of me, so why would they be sick of it? Well, I was being somewhat of a smarty pants in that I figured no one would ever read this stuff anyway, so why not just have fun with it? At any rate, after ten years, maybe some of you are sick of it! 

Apparently Jeff, when he found out about my new blog, wasn't too enamored of my "plain clothes look" on the blog, so he asked for permission to get into my template one day in the latter part of 2005 and came up with the "cardboard & fly" header. I was pretty dang stoked to have a custom made header, and I figured that would be that. However, sometime between the Summer of '06 and early '07, Jeff got into the back room and swapped out the header to what you see everyday here now. Of course, in '07 Jeff left for Ergon, and I never tinkered with that code again.


Okay, that's a look at, well.........the look of this blog over the years and how that happened. Thanks to the internet Wayback Machine for the images of this site as it evolved. Until next time.......