2021 Update
Two days before my first child was born, I decided to start a blog to document my new life as being a father. That was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Over that time, I've posted less and less. I haven't posted anything at all in several years. I think this is mostly due to social media being the main place where I post day-to-day things now.
This site has sort of been a playground for my technical skills. Back in 2003, I was out of touch with web development, so I just installed Movable Type and used that as the blogging software. This was easy to get started with and I soon learned how to customize it more and more. It was at this point in time that I started getting more serious about working with code. Some of my first bug fixes and features submitted to an open-source project were for Movable Type plugins.
Eventually, I spent some time and wrote fully custom templates for Movable Type. This allowed the site to have a completely custom look. Around that time, I started to learn PHP and began adding additional features using that.
Once I started to get more comfortable with PHP, I embarked on my biggest project yet. Trying to create my own custom CMS from the ground up. That ended up turning out really well. I was able to ramp up my PHP skills and create a whole new site that was no longer built using Movable Type, but my own code. For the most part, that was the last iteration of this site up until very recently.
I hadn't posted anything since 2013, so this site is essentially dead. However, I have some sentimental feelings about the content here, so I don't want to just let the posts disappear. To keep the content, I wanted to move everything into a git repo somewhere. All the post content was in a MySQL database (in fact, the same database created by Movable Type all those years ago, my CMS was backward compatible with that), so first I dumped all that data into JSON.
Today, I work as a React developer, so I thought, "why not just recreate this as a modern React app", so I did that. It's not the most efficient thing. All the data is still one giant JSON object. But, I was able to put it together in a matter of a few hours. Made sure all the URLs are still working just as they did in 2013. But now, it's all on Github and can be easily deployed using a site like Netlify.
This may very well be my last post here. I'm happy to see that the site should remain online for some time to come. It's been a great learning experience from then to now.
This site has sort of been a playground for my technical skills. Back in 2003, I was out of touch with web development, so I just installed Movable Type and used that as the blogging software. This was easy to get started with and I soon learned how to customize it more and more. It was at this point in time that I started getting more serious about working with code. Some of my first bug fixes and features submitted to an open-source project were for Movable Type plugins.
Eventually, I spent some time and wrote fully custom templates for Movable Type. This allowed the site to have a completely custom look. Around that time, I started to learn PHP and began adding additional features using that.
Once I started to get more comfortable with PHP, I embarked on my biggest project yet. Trying to create my own custom CMS from the ground up. That ended up turning out really well. I was able to ramp up my PHP skills and create a whole new site that was no longer built using Movable Type, but my own code. For the most part, that was the last iteration of this site up until very recently.
I hadn't posted anything since 2013, so this site is essentially dead. However, I have some sentimental feelings about the content here, so I don't want to just let the posts disappear. To keep the content, I wanted to move everything into a git repo somewhere. All the post content was in a MySQL database (in fact, the same database created by Movable Type all those years ago, my CMS was backward compatible with that), so first I dumped all that data into JSON.
Today, I work as a React developer, so I thought, "why not just recreate this as a modern React app", so I did that. It's not the most efficient thing. All the data is still one giant JSON object. But, I was able to put it together in a matter of a few hours. Made sure all the URLs are still working just as they did in 2013. But now, it's all on Github and can be easily deployed using a site like Netlify.
This may very well be my last post here. I'm happy to see that the site should remain online for some time to come. It's been a great learning experience from then to now.