About

Contact information: Email me at peoriapundit@gmail.com or contact me via Yahoo Instant Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger.

Personal information: I was born in 1963 in Peoria and attended Peoria public schools. I attended Illinois Central College and Eastern Illinois University. I’ve worked for newspapers in Robinson, Canton, Jacksonville and Cape Girardeau, Mo. (home of Rush Limbaugh). I now live in a mobile home in rural Peoria County. My mailing address says “Peoria,” so I get to keep the name of the blog.

Politics: I was raised on my Daddy’s knee to be a Democrat. In my late 30s, I converted to the Libertarian Party. I quit the LP after its most recent standard bearer blamed Sept. 11 on America. I remain a small-”L” libertarian. I am pro-invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, anti torture and anti-domestic spying. I am pro-labor, pro-right-to-choose and pro-gun rights. I favor small government that puts essential services first. I am anti-Communist. When I vote, I tend to value candidates’ honesty and integrity more than party affiliation or political positions. I will not cross a picket line but I will not vote the way any union tells me to. I would rather eat at a greasy spoon than the cleanest corporate eatery. I do not believe God has a preference in whether I vote Democrat of Republican (and I resent anyone who tells me otherwise). I firmly believe the Almighty has a dark sense of humor. I do not begrudge the rich, because one day I might win the lottery. I do not drink (long story), but I do hang out in bars. I listen to Blues.

History: The Website that would become Peoria Pundit began sometime in the fall of 1997, about two years after I first got on the Internet. AOL (that’s right, I was one of those geeks who discovered the Internet through America Online) offered its members free Web space. Intrigued, I threw some pictures and words on it and promptly forgot about it.

I then learned that AOL offered a Web site publishing system called “AOL Press” that showed members how to build pages using hyper text markup language. I was enthralled. HTML was remarkably similar to the coding system we used to set type electronically for the Daily Eastern News and later at the Robinson Daily News.

I took to it and built a couple more pages. It was around that time I started thinking that it would be easy to create a sort of Web-based newspaper.

Heh.

Before long, I was writing articles, and uploading them to the site using FTP. By this time, I was using one of those annoying free hosting services like Tripod. Everything was hand coded using HTML I think I called my first efforts “My Soapbox” or something equally silly, I’m sure.

I think I did four “articles” that way before I quit because no one was reading the damn thing anyway. And it was too much effort.

But I kept playing around, eventually creating a Website devoted to Robert A. Heinlein with a ton of individual articles. I also kept a static page I titled “Bill’s Content,” a play-on-words on the title of the then-new glossy magazine out the news media called “Brill’s Content.” Didn’t see that particular publication? Not many did.

Soon after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, I took a job with the Peoria Times-Observer. I was editor of the paper, but I chaffed under the paper’s pathologically strict policy of not reporting or even commenting on anything that didn’t happen inside the geographical boundaries of what its owner considered “North Peoria.” Feh.

It was around this time I read on the Poynter Institute Website about this strange new thing called “Web logs.” The article described a system that allowed people to write articles, click one single button, and send that article to a Web site. I didn’t require an hour’s worth of HTML code changes and FTP uploading every time you wanted to put something on the Web. The article said there were a bunch of people — some journalists — who were doing this and they were “permalinking” to each other. You could sit down at any Internet accessible computer and post to your blog.

This suited my needs just fine. I was frustrated at not being able to express myself in print. So I created my first Blogger powered site hosted first on Tripod, then on the billdennis.net and later the billscontent.com domain (don’t bother looking for either). I started by recovering some the hand-coded articles and posted them to this brand new blog. The first of my billdennis.net posts was made on Jan. 6, 2002, the date I consider my Blogoversary.

Shortly before my now-infamous interview on WEEK, I renamed my site The Peoria Pundit for marketing reasons. I bought that domain and moved everything over. I lost some of the old Blogger posts, but in most cases, it’s no big loss. Some of those posts were very angry and too raunchy for someone who wants to be taken seriously.

During Peoria Pundit’s existence, I’ve moved from Blogger to pMachine to Movable Type to WordPress, the version you are seeing today. I strongly recommend Word Press. In fact, you get get a free Word Press blog at Blog Peoria.

“Peoria Pundit” is the name of my Web site. My name is Bill Dennis. I never intended for people to call me “The Pundit” or anything like that. When I picked that title, I was playing with the name “Instapundit,” one of the top-rated blogs and I wanted to make a statement about what I wanted my site to be.

I think I’ve made an impact in Peoria, but I don’t think it’s been as great an impact as some people seem to think. Maybe it’s false modesty. I don’t know. What it has done is make me into some kind of half-assed celebrity, but it doesn’t earn me a living. It’s no secret that I’d like to figure out a way to make a living as a blogger. Right now, I’d settle for being able to generate the cash to pay for hosting, my Internet connection and maybe a decent digital camera.

– Bill Dennis
(Revised, 7-30-2008)

About the header image: I snapped this in June 2008 with an $89 digital camera as I was walking to a meeting of the Peoria City Council.