My birthday is tomorrow but there’s an even more significant birthday coming up the day after. On September 3, 2001, I purchased the domain Donnaville.com.

YEP! 10 years folks! Amazing longevity for a girl with nothing to say!

Let’s take a look back at all the different incarnations of Donnaville.

Here is a screenshot of the very first post… note how it is dated September 2… I have no clue why the dates don’t match up. I am 99.9% sure I placed the order on September 2 because I distinctly remember it was a birthday present for myself. Whatever.

Just a few days later, planes crashed into the Twin Towers and so much changed.

A few months later I ditched the default blogger template and came up with my own design. This may also signal the end of my usage of Blogger and the beginning of Movable Type. I simply can’t remember.

The next design that I have evidence of is from 2004:

What I LOVED about this design are the pictures on the left hand side. I would take pictures with my cell phone and upload them to BUZZNET which would then update on Donnaville. You can see an archive of all those pictures, if you want.

I am pretty sure I must have changed the design between 2004 and 2007 but I never took any screenshots. I recall a very 60’s looking design with a fish eye background that my father HATED! Sadly, I can’t find any screenshots of it. I think it was probably around 2007 that I made the move to WordPress. Here’s the 2007 design:

In 2009, I updated my theme to Thesis. It looked like this:

A year or so later, I played around with it a bit:

Now it looks like this:

Prior to September 3, 2001, I had a Website on Geocities. If memory serves me, I started the Geocities page sometime in November of 1996. This is how it looked back in those old days:

And here’s a recreation of the old page.

Ten years with Donnaville, 15 years total. That’s a lot of words.

Looking back, it’s been a fun ride. You’ve been there with me as a I’ve had fun, traveled, lost pets, got dumped, dated, bought a house, fell in love, got fired, hired, fired, hired, started a business, had my heart shattered, lost my dad, and who knows what else is in store ahead. I have no intention of stopping. And I have no intention of getting interesting. In the immortal words of Popeye (words my father would often say as well), I am what I am.