As today is my 44th (pshew) birthday, I figured I’d remind myself how this whole thing started. You’re welcome to join me in this bit of self-realization over the years as built upon in this website, or use the search feature if you stumbled here looking for something – most of my articles are still around.
Still in high school, I was building proprietary software built upon the 6502 processor, interfacing large equipment via RS422. I created the first PC release of the software for Windows 95, which was still at it’s infancy. I started work on an NT4 based system, but was let go before this was completed; I do hope the serial drivers for 95 were stable enough- I was never called back to complete this project.
My first sites and gopher (yes, gopher!) are long lost to the annals of time, thankfully.
I moved to San Francisco in the later 90s to become part of the original DotCom bubble. I was there for Pointcast, Adobe’s Flash, and the introduction of DSL to the masses. It was pretty fun. But this is just my backstory – let me waste some time on this website.
I started this site back during InterNIC, but my first public registration was with GoDaddy in March, 1998, first as a simple way to share my resume – then, to build upon that. It eventually turned from ugly text on an ugly background to a graphical design, and then back to really ugly text on an ugly background, and finally, we’re back to a simple text on a simple background – but possibly, I’m oversimplifying things.
Around Q3 2001 (Can’t remember, finally threw away my 20 year old archival CDs when I moved), I moved to a dynamic system, originally based on NewsPHP, but I quickly grew tired of that, because it had severe limitations, and didn’t work very well. In 2002, I had moved to David Grants’ QuickBlog, a simple little ~10k PHP3 compatible script with a MySQL background with a few trivial features that I thought were pretty neat, which I had built a few features upon (for one, I remember not liking his weird date format which wasn’t time_t based). By 2003, I was running my own CMS, using my modifications to QuickBlog as the basis. Finally, by 2006, I moved from my CMS to TextPattern, having given up on all of my free/OSS software – because I wanted to eat, and was tired of working for (nearly) nothing. That, and my code base for the CMS was ugly, using an inline templating system which mostly wasn’t. It resembled a very, very basic Smarty class (which I had never heard of in 2002 when I started to build this, coincidentally, the same year Smarty first appeared).
Unabashed Plug: I’d like to note that I had this website hosted with ICDSoft from 2003 until 2017, when I decided to bring it back “In-House”. They were great, and I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest them to anyone who doesn’t want to host/manage the system themselves.
It wasn’t until 2018 that I finally ditched that final design, exported all of my data, and reloaded new into TextPattern once more, removing all but a handful of plugins I actually needed.
Other than the contact form, a TrueType Font generator (legacy), and a few plugins handcrafted to work with my old CMS (I used local side redirects because Google used to penalize off-site links – remember that?), this is a bone stock TextPattern installation, now.
There were many years (at the beginning) where I posted nearly daily, slowing down to weekly, monthly, sometimes nearly nothing at all. Then, I thought I’d come back and see if I wanted to continue – then decided to just leave this primarily as an archive, only posting things that I found useful, or amusing. (That’s why I haven’t posted anything in 4 months.)
Thanks for joining me, if you’ve cared to actually read through this.