Barrett Chase? The name sounds familiar. I think I’ve heard of that guy. Who is he again?

If that’s how you’re feel right now, you may be familiar with some of my work.

The Product

The Product was a blog I started in February of 2003 and decided to retire seven years later in February of 2010. Archives are over there on the sidebar, if you’re interested in perusing them. Pff. Whatever. Personal blogs are so aughties.

Perfect Duluth Day

PDD is a community blog I co-created with Scott Lunt back in June of 2003. Originally envisioned as a community-building site for maybe a few dozen people, it soon attracted the participation of hundreds and a readership of thousands. In 2009, we revamped and expanded the blog as a business, and it remains a powerful influence in local politics and media, and continues to build community among both native Duluthians and new transplants.

Occam’s Razor

Some people still know me as a cartoonist. I created, wrote, and drew the comic strip Occam’s Razor, which appeared in the now-defunct Ripsaw News back in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was funny. I should probably draw more.




About

About Me:

My name is Barrett Chase and I live in a place called Duluth, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior. By trade I’m a processing clerk for the US Postal Service, and if your first impulse is to crack a joke about how all postal workers are insane, you don’t know the half of it.

I reside in a brick duplex with a really nice deck that overlooks the lake. My girlfriend Christa lives here too, along with her 30-pound tomcat. We have walls full of books, we eat a lot of vegetables, and we watch a lot of TV. It’s a pretty good life.

If you’d like to learn more about life in Duluth, check out Perfect Duluth Day, a blog I co-created and administrate.

About The Product:

Back in 2002, I started this website as a place to post my weekly comic, Occam’s Razor. I didn’t know what a blog was then, but I had a section on the front page called “News” that I updated whenever I had anything newsworthy to say. One day in early 2003, while working at a part-time job where I did basically nothing except kill time surfing the internet, I discovered weblogs. Two days later, I started my own.

In 2005, I finally gave the blog a name, The Product, and I wrote a tongue-in-cheek manifesto explaining my ideas of what a blog should be like. I also switched from using Blogger to using Movable Type. That worked out fairly well until I upgraded to Movable Type 4, which is a horrible piece of software.

For awhile, I tried videoblogging, but that kind of sucked.

In the summer of 2008, I switched from MT4 to Wordpress. I used to design my own templates, but I stopped doing that.

Categories