All About AllThingsMike, an internet institution for over 25 years
You are looking at the current version of a decades old dinosaur of a personal website, which sprang from the mind of a 46 year old technology freak who wanted to stop concentrating so hard on his career, and start rekindling the creative urges he'd quashed soon after his parents both suddenly perished while he was in college.
AllThingsMike is a personal website. There are no ads. No mention of my career. My intention was to create a "legacy" online concentrating on creative endeavors. When the first version of the site went online on my 46th birthday, May 1, 1999, it was on the Homestead hosting service. From 2001-2013, the site has been on my own allthingsmike.com domain, hosted by a number of different companies. My blog was on Xanga for nearly a decade.
A Short History of AllThingsMike
I've been blessed with a charmed life, unaffected by the tragedy and mistrust which govern most lives. My life has been present during a rather turbulent time from a historical perspective, and since 1999 I've been attempting to make sense of it all on this website. My "electronic experiment in art" is always expanding, to chart the course of this life, and the lives of my fellow humans trapped like me in a reality they never dreamed up or asked for.
My actual "life" began in 1953, but the website, while it would attempt to chart that life, would really only start to chart the current, or "electronic life" when it became active on my birthday, May 1, in the year 1999. It all started when I hit the age of 46, and developed an interest in the power of the computer to bring people together over the internet. I wanted to document my words, my art, my musings, and felt that the promise of the internet to enhance and stimulate creativity and the desire to create would eventually bring my art and musings to the masses, and in return, help my to find the muse which would stimulate all my misdirected energy into a "webpresence". I signed on to the budding GeoCities and Homestead web hosting sites and began creating this "webpresence". My original overblown intentions were to archive my "complete works", poems and prose dating back over thirty years. In addition, I wanted to present "art" created with imaging programs and display my "video" movies.
The poetry never completely got transcribed, but the attempt ongoing. In 2004, I began the second incarnation of the ElectricPoetry website, and have transcribed a good many of my nearly 1000 pieces of poetry written from 1967 to the present. Since I maintain this massive undertaking myself, I sometimes get behind in updating. From 2007 to 2013, most of the updates have been not to the main sections of the website, but to my blog,WhenWordsCollide. After 2013, when Xanga, the service which hosted my blog, went out of business, I began again in earnest to post current poetry to my main website. It went through two more redesigns, with different webhosts. As of 2024 AllThingsMike is hosted by Wix, and I've successfully transcribed the poetry of the complete decades of the 2000s through 2024 to the site. Previous decades are linked to my 2009 version of ElectricPoetry on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
I was too far ahead of the curve with the video yearnings. By the time I "caught up" I'd switched most of my energies to digital HDR photography. The digital videocamera I purchased was in 1999. It was ancient by digital standards and didn't even input digitally to the computer. There have been multiple video cameras since then. I posted my first HD vid on YouTube in 2013. The 2nd videocamera had a digital still picture function. This feature fueled my love of photography as well as videomaking. Photography was first featured on my Webshots Gallery, and is currently showcased on my Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. A lot of images are offered for sale on my online store. My "MikeVideo Internet Movies" and "Video Blog" can be found on my YouTube "channel". Highlights of my video output is showcased in the MikeVideo section of this website.
The many urges I have to write are never completely satiated, and when I do write, which is seldom, the computer screen stares back at me and laughs like those blank pieces of paper staring from my typewriter so long ago. When writing the three times weekly blog WhenWordsCollide on the Xanga service, and gaining a somewhat largish readership I began writing more than I had in a long time. I always have plans, and there have been plans to update and post the many "blognovels" I wrote for the blog. However there will need to be a lot editing, and my life in retirement is full of travel and photography so far.
I keep paying for the privilege of keeping this site up and running, however, and every year there are more promises to myself to add some more content. When I began the present introduction, it was late 2003. Now it's two decades later, and more attempts are abrew to chronicle, to journal, to wax poetic and to philosophize. The New Year always brings promise, and I have always vowed not to break any promises. This year, as I promised during the years previously, I feel the need to wirte, to archive past writings, and to create art, in whatever form it feels it has to take. I vow that I will keep Allthingsmike online until I physically pass from this existence, and by then, I truly hope there is some way I can keep my digital universe online as a legacy of my existence forever.
Besides my artistic propensities, I have always been known to prophesize the Universal Truths which take root in the Universal Mind. On my standalone blogsite "The Universal Blog" I posted spiritual essays detailing my philosophies about life, death, and the hereafter. I resurrected the old "Universal Blog" on Blogger, which is linked on the main page.
There have been many segments of this website, on many different servers over the years. Some sections have flourished, and some have withered away. As the year 2025 dawns, after not having updated the main site for quite a few years, I am now revisiting, reworking, and revising, yet again, my massive "electronic experiment in art." If there are broken links, I vow to fix them. If there is a purpose, I vow to soon let myself know what it is. If I somehow, I ever miraculously gain the readership I crave, and if I somehow start writing like I have vowed in the past, then perhaps I shall find fulfillment. If you, dear reader, feel like you want to journey with me, to the past forms, the present musings, and the future of AllThingsMike, I invite you to come with me.
MFN,poet,philosopher,fool 12.27.03 (perpetually updated, most recently 12.11.24)