My incredibly forgettable first post was published 20 years ago today. The rather unoriginal title “I’m Done” betrayed myself because I was actually just starting. I had only just set up my website a few months prior and I was filled with so much excitement that I was able to publish content online. Even more so, I was so proud of all the work I put into the backend site software that allowed me complete creativity and control.

*tap* *tap* is this thing on? So after a great deal of internal debate, I ditched server-side LAMP based blogging software and migrated to a statically generated system, namely Hugo. Ultimately the decision came down to maintenance. I was creating content at a lower rate than Wordpress (and its plugins/themes/etc.) required updates. Nevermind the need to keep the server software (Apache, MySQL, PHP) secure and updated as well. Even though the migration was painful and the new system can be restricting, I’m glad I did it.

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.

My previous post was my first new entry after recently upgrading servers (I ran out of space on the old one and the software was getting too old). This switch compared to past occurrences was significantly more work and more costly. I say more work because I had over 5 years of different sites, tools, configurations and accounts scattered all over and I had to ensure that each piece migrated without disruption.

I had not put any real work in over 3 years. I knew a lot of things needed some cleanup, but it wasn't until I bought a new monitor that I realized how ugly everything looked. I started the styling from scratch. I know the "blue" has got to go, but I didn't have time to pick a new color scheme. I was going to cave in and switch to WordPress for blogging but I had been working on a new back-end for over a year now and I didn't want to throw that away.