About This Site

Purpose
I decided that the main reason I have this site is to keep a record of myself.  It’s not that I’m all that particularly interesting, but as much as I wish I had a record of the daily goings-on of my parents and grandparents I thought I might as well oblige any of my progeny who may one day wish for the same.

Another reason to have this site going is that if you were to Google “Zach Dotsey,” the first hit is from a message board on geneology.com.  The next 516 or so hits seem to be links to a paper I wrote my freshman year in college(!?) about the X-Men.  Yahoo is about the same, except it starts off with a bit of fiction written by my good buddy Rick Titus, followed by about 250 of the aforementioned paper, ancestry message boards and school articles about some of my cousins, mostly Roger and Shelby Dotsey.

MSN’s search is much kinder.  The first result is the me page, followed by a “No jail for pot” list I signed years ago.  Mind you, I’ve never even smoked a cigarette, much less pot.  We then get a couple “paper” links, then an obit for my grandfather, Roy Jack Horner, followed by a bunch more crappy report links.

My point in all that is that I’d like to actually come up a little higher in search engines.  I mean jeez, Amanda’s page on my site comes up first when you Google her!

May 8, 2006 Update
I’m actually ranking, consistently, at the top of Google and Yahoo with my home and about me pages (on the old design).  MSN apparently likes my wish list the best.

History
Things are constantly being updated, if I am allowed to define “constantly” as “as I decide to do it”.  I am getting the In My Life section, which is actually the home page updated daily at least.  The In My Life section is sort of a daily blog sort of thing.  Maybe that’s not quite right, since a blog tends to be more than just a blurb about what’s going on in one person’s life.  Blog sounds better than journal anyway, and a journal is just a better name for a diary.  Anyway, you can check out what’s been , because my life is really interesting.  It is, I promise.

This site’s definitely a work in progress.  I think I’ve finally decided on a few things to put on my site, as evidenced by the links right there. ——————–> (This originally pointed at the links I decided to have for the time).

Amanda said this design doesn’t show my personality.  I’ll try to inject a bit more of it in the future.

So I did that at one point, but the site was still ugly (unlike my shining personality).  I kept it extremely simple in order to still easily make updates.  In fact, the only thing I had on the site was a very processed picture of half of my face.  I really liked the picture (despite how pretentious it looked) but I eventually decided I wanted to do something nicer and also use some more convenient software.  I found WordPress, which I’ve now implemented and am really liking.  I found a skin for the design that I liked too, and figured out how to easily change the header, which I plan to do on a semi-regular basis.