A personal website has just been a thing I’ve never been able to let go of. I’ve been horrible about updating them, but I’ve always kept a site around. As such, I realized recently that I’ve had a website continuously for almost 30 years. I got my first website around 1995 or 1996 when I headed off to college. Let’s just say, none of us knew what we were doing. We coded our sites from hand and filled them with every animated gif we could find and no background image was too busy. The flaming logo still remains my personal favorite touch on my websites.

After college, the website transferred over to radicalwacko.com, a domain name that I certainly never could live up to and eventually it transitioned into lostinok.com. During that same time, the technology transitioned as well from my early home built blogs with ASP code and Access databases and eventually landing on WordPress like everyone else.

At the same time I started hopping from social network to social network, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter and on and on. And I’ve seen them all collapse and morph and merge taking my content with them with the implode, merge or morph.

About a year ago, when I broke my leg, I got the urge to start blogging again. I logged into the Wordpress backend and spent quite a bit of time patching and updating it and getting it ready to start. This is not a slight against Wordpress at all, but a blogging platform it really isn’t any more. It’s an amazingly in-depth and powerful CMS, but if you just want to keep a personal blog that you can easily edit and adapt it really isn’t any more. I got frustrated with it and with how slow my site was running under it and basically I threw up my hands and gave up.

I’ve recently started working through a bunch of old pictures and wanted a place to post them and realized that I’m pretty much out of photo sharing sites that I love or have confidence in their long term viability. So I started investigating other options when I came across the somewhat niche market of static website generators. Much like NoSql databases took a few niceties of the relational database and applied it to the previous flat file technology to make something new and exciting, static site generators take some basic CMS concepts and markdown formatting and apply it to make an easy way to generate plain HTML websites quickly and easily. I’ve settled on Hugo and while that could be a disastrous choices, the nice thing about the current state of the static site generator is that all of them make it pretty easy to transition between them if I have made the wrong choice. Or at least I hope so. There is a still a lot of old content with broken links to dead services that needs to be fixed or deleted, but I’m happy with where the site is now.

Also big thanks to Carl Schwan for showing me an easy way to do commenting with Mastodon.

I won’t make any promises that I’m going to be posting all the time, I’ve already broken those too many times. However, I can at least feel good that I have a place to post a thought or two should one arise.

Gallery of My Many Websites

See also

• A Digital Reboot
• Blog Issues
• Zempt