Quick History Of This site

I guess you could say the earliest ideas for this site began in the late 1990s with me playing with Geocities.com, Angelfire.com, and Tripod. That stuff was mediocre at best, but it was what got me started learning and wanting to do more.

Sometime in early 1999, I think it was, I registered for an overpriced shared hosting plan that really didn’t give much at all. It was a good place to start, though. If I am remembering correctly, the domain registration was $35 a year too.

Once I registered the first domain, I handwrote the HTML of the pages. That was always a pain. I envisioned something like the static site generators even back then. Eventually I used server side includes to do things like the navigation. Next I upgraded to Frames! Those were the days of overpaying for the domain and crappy Interland hosting.

Those days in the late 90s and early 2000s meant I was using WS_FTP. That program worked fine, but eventually I moved on to filezilla. With the way dial-up internet was so flaky and slow, it could take a bit for several kilobytes to upload. I don’t miss those days at all.

It was a wonderful feeling to be able to do that and have a website and stuff like that. I loved learning new things and trying out different layouts. It was far more fun and interesting to me than the stuff I did on Geocities and free services like that.

My brother wanted me to do a website for his business, so I did that. To do so, I switched the shared hosting. That gave me php.

It sat mostly dormant for several years, then I switched to WordPress. That worked well at the time, and it made things much easier to update. I found a theme I sort of liked and used that. It wasn’t too long until I switched to a VPS so I could play with the server stuff more. I also switched to FreeBSD.

It sat dormant for a few more years after a few years of blog posts. I admit that I did a poor job keeping WordPress up to date during that time. I just wasn’t bothering with it. There were too many frustrations with it.

After that, I tried B2evolution in late 2018, I think, which was very nice but more than I needed, which meant more potential security risks with no benefits of having those options. I mean, I didn’t need or want forums or a gallery and all that extra stuff. I wanted clean, fast, and secure. It was definitely fun to play with it for a few months, though.

In 2019 I switched things over to Hugo and slowly tweaked the theme to make it what I want. The Hugo template system was always such an exercise in frustration. It just doesn’t make sense to my brain, but I used it for a while. I built the templates slowly to handle the data from my personal weather station. The tables were generated from the csv files from Ambient Weather.

In 2023 I slowly converted the templates to Zola and then switched to that permanently. The templating system in Zola is a joy to use compared to Hugo. That made things fun.

In 2024 I switched back to shared hosting since I didn’t want to have to think too much about the server side. I wrote about that situation elsewhere.

During 2025 I wrote fewer posts but tweaked the layout a bit and slowly tweaked the CSS to remove as many classes as possible. Also in 2025 I switched the domain to something I had sitting around for another project.

In early 2006 I switched back to a VPS since I missed the tinkering and my head was clearer. I also switched to a new domain that has a better ring to it.

Most of the original stuff is still available. The only thing I had tweaked was converting it to Markdown and making it work with my current theme.

It’s all generated by Zola and runs on FreeBSD on my end. It is then uploaded to shared hosting.

Here are my past hosts and my thoughts on them. I have been through nearly 20 now!