Back to the written word

Welcome (back?) to History4Today.com. This is a blog and a general front-page for stuff I’m doing in 2021.

Hello! I’m Dan Allosso. I’ve been blogging off and on (mostly on) since 1999. Over the years I’ve run a bunch of different sites devoted to topics that have grabbed my attention and interest.

• Wireless tech and wardriving when wifi was brand-new in 1999. When wifi was new, NO ONE secured their networks. You could drive around with a notebook open and just make a map of all the open access points in town. Didn’t even need a Pringles-can antenna.
• British secularist Charles Bradlaugh in the early 2000s. He was very popular with the folks in Northampton England. I even got a press clipping sent to me by a friend of Allan Moore, of a bunch of people toasting Bradlaugh at his statue on his birthday. That was fun.
• A site called History Punk when I was a grad student. I posted stories of the interesting stuff I was learning, as well as book reviews of the things I was reading for my teaching fields — which got a surprising amount of traffic. Must have been a lot of other grad students out there, I can only imagine.
• An Environmental History site that still exists (the others you can only see on the Wayback Machine).

In the past, because I came from the computer industry, I used to register my own domains and host my own websites. But I’m no longer on top of the tech and my coding skills have eroded. It’s like a language you used to be fluent in but haven’t spoken for 30 years — literally! I’m going to have to start taking German I again next fall with my son! Use it or lose it.

Luckily, there are now ways to have a website and a blog with a bit less coding. So I’m going to try to talk about all my stuff via this WordPress site.

SO…here I am. After over 20 years. This WordPress site has been dormant for a while. I was using it to blog about Open Educational Resources. Then I thought I might blog about history, but I ended up spending a lot of time the last year making some podcasts and a lot of videos. I’m going to keep doing that, but it seems like some folks still read stuff off of screens, too. So I’m going to start posting stuff here, about all the different projects I’m working on. Over time, some of these projects will probably develop their own subpages. But hopefully, I’ll be able to run them all from here. So wish me luck and stay tuned!