My website has gone through quite a few iterations since its original conception back in the Fall of 2005. It was originally a C++ app I wrote from the ground up, listening on an open socket on my computer for people trying to connect via their browsers. It was a mess, but a really badass project and I learned a ton about network programming. If you have no idea what that means, this method for making a website is like cooking in which you have to build your own house, kitchen, and oven before you can even start making dinner.

I then eventually made a PHP and MySQL site, but again from scratch. I taught myself PHP and learned a lot about databases, but the site was basic, inflexible, and arduous to work on and update. The cooking metaphor? Making a cake from complete scratch, and doing a half-assed icing job. The most rewarding part was knowing you baked it yourself with your own recipe. It looks bad, but tastes pretty good. In the end your kitchen is a mess though, and you spent a lot of time working on it.

Finally, I gave up and installed Wordpress, an extremely popular CMS. I transferred over the majority of my blogs, but have yet to update it since. Extended metaphor aficionados could see this as making a boxed cake, and hiring a professional to do the icing job.

So I haven’t posted a blog in over a year, and I’m hoping to get back into it. Since I’ve installed Wordpress and seen how extremely flexible and easy to use it is, I have helped a few different friends set up their own websites, all powered by Wordpress. I don’t regret rolling my own site for so long, but the time has come to abandon the persuit for web development knowledge and jump on the all-in-one CMS bandwagon.

Hopefully soon, my blog will again but graced by the elegant unintelligible babble of my own obfuscated reflections on life. Something I’m sure that you, dear reader, are shitting yourself over in anticipation.