10 Years

I registered this domain name mjmwired.net 10 years ago to this date. My younger brother helped me pick out the name. This was after spending several months asking people who owned various domains with 'mjm' (which were unused) if they would agree to sell them to me. Nothing worked out. I ended up using a registrar that my older brother used, and used first paid hosting service I could find that allowed shell access. It only cost me $40/year.

Back then, blogs I read mostly existed on Blogger (which Google had acquired only a month earlier) and other cheasy sites (like Xanga). I remember most self hosted blogs/sites I read used MovableType, but I found the software a little difficult and I wasn't much for Perl. I was too cheap to purchase Radio Userland. I remember looking at WordPress which had not even reached a 1.0 yet (which happened 3 months later) and found it missed a few critical features.

So, I downloaded some tutorials and started hacking away at some code. It would take me 2 months before I could say "I'm Done". Those were 2 fun months. I miss the enthusiasm I had back then even though some of the self inflicted torture makes me wince. I ended up installing Apache/MySQL on Windows 2000 just to do web development! My Linux (RedHat 7.3 at the time) would have been much more suitable but the web was dominated by Internet Explorer (Netscape 7 was struggling).

Lots has happened since those few months in 2003. I don't think my site ever made a significant impact (though I'm somewhat proud my resources pages have had several million views in the past 10 years) but I'm happy with what I've done. The last few years haven't been as productive as they could have been, but its never too late to start again.

I hope to be writing more, I really do.

Posted in: Website,

1 Comments:

• Reader on March 2, 2013 ~ 11:23 PM

  Interestingly saw this on the web:
  http://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on-the-weekend-is-what-everyone-else-will-do-during-the-week-in-ten-years/
  “It?s a good bet these present-day hobbies will seed future industries. What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”