[Linked Image from blueridgemuse.com]

In a week, Oct. 1, Capitol Hill Blue and ReaderRant will celebrate their 28th-year anniversary on the World Wide Web of the internet.

It was the morning of Oct. 1, 1994, I logged on to the web and had a message that my internet provider was giving all members free space for a website, effective that day. I decided to write about 750 words in a political column about the madness in Washington, titled it "Capitol Hill Blue" and sent it out to my personal email list. I called the column "The Rant" and created a subdomain, called ReaderRant for comments and discussions.

New columns were created weekly for the last three months of 1994 before I took them weekly with accompanying news articles and photos. Those on the email list recommended the site to others and the Washington Post said it was part of a new set of websites created in the Nation's Capitol and dubbed CHB a "necessary stop for political junkies."

On Oct. 1, I will have some stories about the creation, development, and history of the sites, including the good times and the bad ones.

To quote Jerry Garcia in the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," we can say "What a long, strange trip it's been."

My thanks to the moderators and the members who have kept this forum going as a large part of what is recognized as the longest-running daily news site on the web."

Doug