The domain "WrangPlonet.net" originally was not my domain, it was registered originally under the name of "John Tuttle" for a few years before the domain lapsed, during that time it held an offensive and borderline (albeit it would be by today's standards) illegal IRC quote database, which insulted many people, including myself, that the people in the close circle of friends of the registrant at the time just did not like for various reasons.
Roll on 2011, 6th July was the saving grace for wrangplonet.net, the end of the humiliation to all those that had suffered, the people who were friends with the previous registrar were furious when they knew I had purchased the domain after it had lapsed, one of which accused me of "cyber squatting" on the domain despite the fact I'd put up an active website, albeit very basic and akin to a dial-up era website, it ran on a server at my home address rather than me pay for hosting.
The "blue van" logo and references were mainly to poke fun at someone who allied with "John Tuttle" in their humiliation (which today would have been horrendously illegal) of a then friend of mine, I potentially had access to one in 2009 after passing my driving test and did make it clear that I would drive it to go to protect said friend from harm if permitted and if a car wasn't available (I did move it only on private land), I don't actually have a blue van though but maybe a thought for the future as a camper if money allows
I changed the site over to WordPress a few years later for ease of editing, while this was all good for the most part in recent years before the switch to this platform the server was targeted often so I had to switch over to routing it through Cloudflare over the 2023/2024 period which broke the site massively from that perspective.
While I ran the operation from home, it took someone to do a whois on the domain to ultimately end up doxxing me, who this was remains a mystery but |I have always had my suspicions that it was someone from the circle of people involved in submitting to the offensive IRC quote database that was on this domain before I got hold of it, as soon as the option was there I had the registrant address hidden and when I moved address almost 7 years after founding the site, the new address was not leaked and remains out of the public domain to this day, so if you have to set up a website from home, I strongly recommend use of a Domains By Proxy service.
The site remained hosted from home until early 2025, at which point because my Internet connection arrangements were to change to something budget friendly then I had to cease hosting from home and look into an alternative arrangement and that has only just been sorted within the 14th year of my ownership of this domain.
I ran a lot of segments on the site up until its shutdown, but the site became cluttered and hard to navigate over the years as I updated and added more and more to it, I ran a section, which will be returning, called "The Motorway", this took aim at the state of this country's roads and because I now have roads of foreign lands, notably France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States, to compare the UK's roads with, this should be rather more telling, that segment also took aim at particular vehicles as well, say they were exceptionally hideous to look at or just downright worrying or if I believed they were dubious in other ways, I also flagged up bad driving on this segment as well because I saw plenty of that up until the months leading up to the shutdown of the site.
So WrangPlonet.net arrives in 2025, still home of the blue van, still looking at things differently, while I have the old site's records backed up I think it is time for some fresh stuff, some of the old stuff may make a return, other content may not, the site isn't my primary job, other things do take priority over it, there have also been some personal issues in my life that have prevented me from even getting the site back up and running but I have pushed myself at last to do it.
So the third rework of the site in its 14 year history under the tenure of a civilised human being with morals and common sense is about to begin, it's going to be a rollercoaster ride
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