Ok, so no I have not been living in Montreal for 10 years, but my domain name “ConsideredNormal.com” was registered 10 years ago on April 14th, 2018.
A screen capture of the WhoIs lookup for ConsideredNormal.com
Back then I started a blog to process my feelings over a break up that had really affected me. It was used as a tool to express my feelings in a way I could not through normal means. After a year I tried to make the site into a webtoon, but that didn’t fare well. My toon was based on photos I took, but I just couldn’t get into scripting… my mind just wasn’t in the right place, as this was just after my father passed.
I had turned it into a blog again like it is today, but I had switched the domain from being a WordPress blog and pointed the domain towards Tumblr for a little while, which, to this day, still mirrors all my posts and photos.
However in late June 2012, 6 months after moving to the island, I once again started a WordPress blog. For the most part, my site was just writing about life in Montreal, but there were a few tech posts that really made things take off and put Considered Normal on the map.
On July 30, 2013, while working at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, I ran into an issue while imaging several systems in their computer lab. After installing an image created by windows native SysPrep, the computer refused to boot. I searched the web high and low and found an answer buried deep in the forums. As it was hard to find the answer, I decided to write about it, so that others could find the answer much more easily. It became one of my most popular posts, hitting an all-time monthly high of 1,286 views two years later.
The monthly hits for my post about the Sysprep Reboot loop issue
The following year, on September 9, 2014, after hitting another issue in the computer center, where I made my virtual hard drive a little too small, I searched for documentation on how to resize the drive. After reading several articles and finally finding out how I wrote another tech article detailing how I succeeded. This article, which is still popular today, hit an all-time high of 673 views back in October of 2016.
The monthly hits for my post about resizing Virtual Hard Drives
These are just a few of the articles that made my site reach over 3,000 hits a month over the last few years. I know 3K views is nothing in the world of social media, but for a small time blog, that’s quite a bit considering the blog was supposed to be about my thoughts and rants…
So for the 10-year anniversary (I know I am late by a few months) I have decided to update the skin of the site to be a little more “fun”… at least it looks that way to me… a bit cleaner anyways. Still working on a few kinks here and there.