Hello World 🌴

A little history of me making blogs and sites. And writing words on them.

This is my first blog post in a very long time. I might be a little rusty :)

A brief history of my websites and blogging

This is my new website, focused on my journey as a frontend and full stack software engineer, my interests, my projects and my ideas for "someday" projects.

I built this one from scratch using React and Next and some other neat libraries. The last time I rolled my own blog was circa 1998, before the term "blog" was even in common parlance.

Here's a brief history of my blogs and web presences:

Everything/Nothing Site

"a genre of blogs in which the content means everything to the author but nothing to most everyone else; often abbreviated as e/n" Urban Dictionary

I built my everything/nothing site with basic HTML which I learned from a book that probably weighed more than me, and Photoshop. Every time I made a new post, I wrote it in HTML and then uploaded the index.html to the host's FTP site. A place for me to express my random high-school-nerd-in-Santa-Barbara-🌴 thoughts and share them with others in the wider e/n community, a community of websites with forums that linked and referenced each other. My proudest moment was getting a ton of hits after I convinced a more popular e/n site owner to include my site in the list of links on his site's sidebar.

My first job, around this time, was building custom computers for college students with my first employer and mentor, JPT. I built his business website (tech stack: HTML and Photoshop!), as well as websites for other clients.

Livejournal

One of the first blogging platforms, I adopted it immedately, and my profound teenage writings began appearing there. I continued using it for much of college. From then on, when a new blogging platform arrived, I would try it out for a new set of writing during a new cycle of my life.

Myspace

Before Myspace I experimented with a few now-forgotten platforms (anyone remember Lipstick and Cigarettes?). When Myspace launched in 2003 I began using it along with everyone else. Myspace had a blog feature which was rarely used, but I used it to document my journeys from the end of college, to my stint teaching English for a year in Chile, to my return home and the beginnings of my interest in permaculture and sustainable systems.

Fotolog

I used this early, basic version of Instagram in 2005-2006 to post pictures and writings about my time living in Chile.

orienting.blogspot.com

I used blogspot to document my three month backpacking trip through China, Laos and Thailand.

I used another blogspot blog to document my three month bike-touring trip through New Zealand.

Wordpress

Eventually I migrated to the supremely popular Wordpress platform. My first Wordpress site was a place to write about urban foraging for rare fruits, nuts, and edible mushrooms, as well as the politics of sustainable food systems.

Tumblr

I knew nothing of Tumblr's interesting reputation until many years later. For me, it just seemed like another Blogspot clone. Since I enjoyed trying out different platforms, I used it to write about my experiences living in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer between 2012 and 2014, managing sustainable infrastructure projects, working with cacao farmers around themes of organic production and forming cooperatives, and implementing school gardens.

Wordpress Business Sites

Later, I used Wordpress to host two different business websites:

edulisgardens.com (now defunct): a site I built from scratch using some dynamic jQuery, Bootstrap styles and cutting edge tech like an auto-rotating image carousel 🫠. It also integrated with Instagram and had an online store to sell rare fruit.
a website for marketing my laundry greywater installation business.

Custom Built Portfolio, 2015

After enjoying building those business/marketing sites for my own projects, it eventually became more clear to me that pivoting back into web development and software engineering would be my next career move. I tought myself the latest in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, religiously attending a local coding meetup to glean as much information and practice as possible. I threw up a portfolio page featuring sick jQuery animations in 2015 and hosted it on Github pages. I won't link to it for you, because a decade later, it kind of makes me cringe :).

Medium

In 2016 I started a Medium blog to write about my experiences while attending Hack Reactor, an immersive full stack Javascript and CS fundamentals bootcamp. An extremely hands-on, making-awesome-things-focused course (fully remote, before that was a thing!) that fully launched my career as a software engineer.

Many of these sites are lost to history. Some are still out there, floating in the ethers of the internet, for now....