Welcome to my website and thanks for taking the time to read it. I've had some sort of website for around 15 years now, the first being an AOL page I called
The Liahona which I later renamed and expanded, calling it
JMROnline. I don't remember when exactly I started it, but it was in the late 1990s and then I expanded and renamed it probably around 2000. It was on the expanded website I had what I guess could be my first "blog" though it really was more of an opinion page. I had intended for it to be updated regularly with my thoughts on various issues, but that never happened; instead I wrote it and it never got changed. My first "blog" was on my
MySpace page, which I started in 2006. I updated it fairly regularly for about a year and a half. I officially
started this blog in February 2008 more to direct traffic to my MySpace blog and to be able to comment on friends' blogs here at Blogger. In late February 2008 I decided to
start blogging here instead of MySpace. While that ended my regular use of my MySpace blog, it also pretty much ended my regular use of MySpace all together. I still have
a profile there, but haven't updated it in awhile. I'm mostly here or on Facebook. What's funny is most of my friends did pretty much the same thing, migrating to Facebook pretty much exclusively with several also on Blogger. In early 2010 I copied all of my MySpace blog posts here to Blogger. My AOL site was discontinued by 2007 or 2008 when AOL shut down their Hometown AOL service. Since coming to Blogger, I have created additional blogs. In December 2011, I created my newest blog,
Happenin' History and organized all of my blogs and various online profiles better. For more about me, please read my
posted resume.
Live From Kent...
This is my main blog that I originally started as an opinion section of my old site
JMROnline that later went to MySpace and finally to Blogger. As for the name, I came up with it from seeing a former co-worker's MySpace page. He used the profile name "Live from Thunderhawk" (Thunderhawk was a roller coaster I operated when I worked at Geauga Lake amusement park in 2005 and 2006) and I thought it sounded usable substituting Kent and so it stuck. On September 9, 2010,
I acquired the domain name jonridinger.com for this site. I don't think I ever thought of the blog as anything more than an expressive outlet and a way to communicate. As such, it jumps around from my opinions on political and current events, to random thoughts, to updates from trips, and more. Basically, I pretty much blog about what's on my mind that isn't too personal. Usually opinion blogs were triggered by something; a news story, an experience, something I heard, etc. In other words, I have some sort of rationale behind any post I make. Sometimes I just want to share some good news!
Unleashed
I
started this blog September 2010, making my first post there on September 9th. I mainly started it as a way to present my most personal thoughts without having the entire world know about them (or at least have ready access to them...). I had thought of just making my main blog private (which is what many of my friends had done), but I liked being able to use it as a way to communicate not only with friends, but as a way to spread information to anyone who may be looking for it. Thus, I opened what I initially called
Live From Kent...Unleashed. When I reorganized the blogs in December 2011, I decided to drop the "Live From Kent..." part and just call it
Unleashed. If you would like to read
Unleashed, I have to approve your email address (which is your login), so basically I have to know you personally. I would say
Unleashed is where I vent my frustrations. It's very therapeutic even if only a handful of people actually read it.
Happenin' History
This is my latest blog, which I started December 5, 2011. Earlier that day
I posted on
Live From Kent... about possibly creating a history-only blog and before I even published that post, I had already started the new blog (the
first post on
Happenin History is stamped 45 minutes before my post on
Live From Kent...). My first actual history post was the next day after I got the new header and the page layout settled.
Happenin' History will generally focus on the areas of history I am most interested in: Kent, Latter-day Saint History, and some Ancient History. Those are hardly the only topics I will cover, but my main reason for creating it was because I found that I was referring more and more people to my blog for some of the history blogs I had written, but it was mixed in with my other opinion or life events posts. I wanted a place where people could just read the history stuff I wrote and not have to wade through my opinion posts.
Inactive blogs
During my student teaching I created two additional blogs, one called
Middle C that I had intended to be a way to communicate with students and parents of the school I did my student teaching at. I got it set up and posted I think once in it, but never maintained it for a variety of reasons. I finally deleted it in mid 2011. I also created a blog to communicate with my supervising teacher while I was student teaching. It has the all-original title of
Jon's Student Teaching Journal and is still available online. Once student teaching ended in April 2009, I stopped updating it. I haven't yet deleted it because I plan on publishing it for my own records. I have never migrated it to a jonridinger.com web address and have no plans to at this point since it isn't going to ever be updated again. That blog encompasses 16 posts and ends April 26, 2009, 2 days after I taught my last day. It was supposed to be 24 posts (1 weekly review and one lesson review per week) but since I didn't even get a supervising teacher until week 4, I didn't start blogging until week 5.
I love comments, but after receiving random and inappropriate comments from people who choose to remain anonymous, I chose to first moderate comments and eventually prohibited comments from anonymous users. I intend for these blogs to remain my public outlet to the world for the foreseeable future. Feel free to browse the links to the various other sites I have a presence on, like Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and more.
