About
Is there anything on this planet more annoying than idiots who register .me domains? Oh. Wait.
But in all seriousness, no. So why did I do it? Well, partly because I wanted to have a space separate from stephenbolen.com, which I have plans of turning into a glorified vCard. We had a good run for a while, but I wanted to shift gears and start anew. Hence this über-vain .me domain.
Why sbolen.me?
Fair enough – I’ll bite. On most social web networks, I go by sbolen. On the ones I don’t, it’s StephenBolen or stephen_bolen. Since I’m using this site mainly to write longer than 140 character tweets on topics that interest me, I decided to go for the consistency angle.
Also, I wanted to install Pretty Link, the bad-ass WordPress plugin that allows me to shorten links.
Who are you?
Writing a bio is hard work. So I’m going to crib the one that I wrote for Gladius Communications:
Stephen Bolen is a St. Louis-based web and graphic designer with 9 years of professional experience. Mr. Bolen specializes in creating affordable, high quality web and graphic design solutions for a wide variety of clients, ranging from political to non-profit, e-commerce to the arts. Currently, Mr. Bolen is employed at Sigma-Aldrich (life science/high technology industry), where he is on a team managing web pages that generate $2.1 million per day in revenue. Previously, Mr. Bolen has worked with Hunter Engineering Company (automotive industry) and The Creative Group (creative/advertising agency), and has done consulting work with Pricegrabber (comparison shopping portal) and BizRate (eCommerce).
Mr. Bolen is a member of the Gateway Interactive Marketing Association, eMarketing Association and the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council. He holds undergraduate degrees from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Music Performance and Music History/Literature and an undergraduate degree from Fontbonne University in Management. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Management and Leadership and a MBA with an emphasis in Web Technologies from Webster University.
Mr. Bolen resides in Southwest St. Louis with his wife and daughter.
What’s up with the gap in posts in your archive?
So something happened when importing all of the content from stephenbolen.com – mainly, a lot of stuff didn’t make it.
Believe me, I tried to recover it, but to no avail. So instead of banal minutiae, you’ll instead see a rather large gap – nearly 9 months(!!!!) – without any content in the archives.
Thanks, WordPress. You’re a real champ.
An abbreviated history of personal domain names I’ve owned
At one point, I had over 155 domain names in my GoDaddy account. Now it’s just a healthy number. Here are some highlights:
- inebriated.org
A website I started in 2000. If memory serves, I was just starting out with the PHP Nuke CMS. It sucked, the site got absolutely zero traffic, and I didn’t renew the domain name. Fail. - stevebolen.com
My first attempt at a firstname-lastname dot com address in college. I had it running a very old version of WordPress (1-point-something) and, again, it sucked. My side theory on this whole thing is that blogging, for the most part, sucked ass in early part of this decade, and ergo, you didn’t get traffic unless you were cnn.com. Fail. - sportlounge.net
I started the sports lounge forums with a handful of good people to talk sports locally. This thing blew up and got hella traffic. The forum pulled down so much traffic I had to get a dedicated server. Life was good in 2003-05. - sportscartel.com
You’ll see references to the Sports Cartel Blog Network strewn around this site. I, along with a friend from the forum, started a sports blog network “officially” (in the eyes of the State of Missouri, anyway) on August 25, 2005. We then registered about 120 domains and recruited authors. Life was great. We had a whole load of advertisers on board who were still in the “PageRank is LIFE” midset, and we had a lot of properties with PR between 4 and 6. Cha-ching! I eventually bought out my partner in 2007, and tried to make a run at prosperity, right around when Google decided to rewrite their PR algorithm. Suddenly the sites weren’t worth as much. I sold the forum, which had over 1.8 million posts and shut things down when the economy crapped the bed in late 2008. The majority of those domains are in the process of expiring without renewal. - stephenbolen.com
I registered my professional sounding firstname-lastname dot com domain in 2008. Which now redirects here. - chateaubolen.com
My wife and I have a domain name we registered for family stuff, but we’re not really using it much anymore. It’s on the list of things to do. - stleats.tv
Chris Reimer of RizzoTees fame and I are starting a St. Louis-based restaurant review video blog. This is our concerted effort to score free meals at the area’s hottest new and amazingly awesome establishments. Should be full of win. - sbolen.me
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