Sometimes, people out there ask me a question about void-star.net, and I have to give them the following answer; “The CMS made me do it.”
Hi there, my name’s Dee and — at the time of writing, at least — I’m one of the last blogs on Earth that doesn’t use WordPress.
It’s not my fault, honestly. When I started this site — way back in 2001 when it was called synthetickiss.com — WordPress did not exist. Hell, b2 didn’t either. PHP, at that time, was a fairly new language and it’d only just started creeping hand-in-hand with its platonic life partner, MySQL, into the web sphere. I knew about the language because it was what Scot had picked to write the revision of grep with, and I figured that if a language was good enough for Scot then it must be A++ awesome.
At the time, the idea of using a database-driven engine for a blog was kind of novel. Most everyone at the time used Blogger, which was a very different beast than today. Essentially, you’d give the service your FTP details, and it would push out flat-text files for your posts and archive. Crazes of SSI and PHP includes came around and went, all attempting to add flexibility into what was essentially an inflexible system. The only other system available at the time was a Perl CGI script that I swear was called Greymatter but references to which I can no longer find on the Intrawebs. There was no PHP/MySQL solution.
So, in the latter half of 2001, I decided to write one.
It was called sk.log; the “sk” in honour of the acronym for my site at the time. I’d originally intended to release it publicly — and even did, for a while — but the development of b2 started shortly after I was mired in my own script, and rocketed to healthy popularity.
I stuck with sk.log for the next seven years. Despite its flaws — and there were many — and despite its complete and utter lack of anything even resembling an admin panel, I’d written it and, as such, it was idiosyncratically mine.
A while ago, I made a list. Kinda of like New Year’s Resolutions, I guess, except it was, like, September. The list contained two things:
- Join a gym.
- Migrate v-s.net to WordPress.
I looked at my list for all of about a day, before chucking the whole thing into the “too hard” basket. Except… I did end up joining a gym. And I’ve been going, on average, five times a week for the last three weeks.
So that just leaves on thing left to do…
661 days ago
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