Andy Anonymous is the personal website of Andy Tatnall, blogger and aspiring author. His contributions to the written websphere have taken place with wildly varying levels of frequency and success since 1994.
The primary function of this site is to give shelter to Andy’s stories, observations and pet peeves, as well as others’ reactions to them. Information about any other projects he might be working on may be found here as well. In addition to authoring the contents of this site, he also created all of the graphics himself.
Andy’s origin story began on November 16, 1976. That day the Boston Lying-in Hospital served up a little pot roast which, left to marinate under the semi-watchful eyes of Robert and Linda Tatnall, broiled up into the curator of this museum of musings in which you now loiter.
The marinating took place mostly across the suburban tundra of Hudson, Massachusetts, a town nestled snugly at the crossroads of Nowhere and Nevah-Hearda-It. Even citizens of bordering towns can often produce no account of Hudson. Regardless, this little settlement west of Boston is where Andy was shaped. He first began to enjoy writing and to practice it regularly in high school.
Today Andy lives in Derry, New Hampshire, and is at work on what he hopes will be his first published novel.
Andy’s first experiments on the web began in the mid-90s, when he took advantage of the “View Source” feature on other websites—like an amateur chef at a buffet where the recipe for every dish is posted next to it—to learn HTML. The result was “Cyclops McGinnis’ Leftovers Archive”, which resided on the servers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, like most sites of the time, offered little more than a disjointed menagerie of mildly amusing jokes and chain emails on a very grey background.
After leaving RPI Andy started over, this time crafting “Cyclops McGinnis’ CrazyPage!” which featured a slightly improved design (using the term very loosely) and some more original content, but was still quite raw. A year or two later the site underwent a major overhaul, with a customized framed layout and all original graphics for the first time, and was renamed to “Cyclops McGinnis’ Nonsense”. This site was nomadic, undergoing multiple host changes, but was actively updated until 2001 when Andy began work on a new blog-oriented site. That site is still preserved today, available from the menu on the left, for when one becomes inflicted with a few moments of ennui.
In 2001 Andy’s site took on a more subdued tone utilizing a “highway at night” theme. However, for a few years “The Tepid O’Hare EXPERIENCE” was really just a cool looking front end for the old “Nonsense” site, in spite of the main page’s promise of a “Writings” section. (Apparently the Tepid O’Hare experience was a lot like the Cyclops McGinnis one.) In fact, blog entries did not begin to appear on the site until 2004, at which time the Forum was also installed with a theme Andy designed himself to match the rest of the site. The T.O.E. retained that design until 2007, when the site was updated to a more practical structure, migrating the blog from Greymatter to WordPress and utilizing CSS for the layout. It was also renamed “Andy Anonymous” after the moniker Andy had assumed on MySpace. The name is a tribute to Dead Milkmen lead singer Rodney Anonymous as well as an amusing oxymoron. OK, not that amusing.
The current theme, Penny Dreadful, was created and implemented in December 2009.
