Catching up

So I’ve slowly been adding my archives to this site. I’ve got most of the data all the way back to the very beginning way back in 2000. There are quite a few gaps still but I hope to be able to fill them in as I find the data. Thanks to archive.org, I’ve managed to find probably 80% of my missing entries and pull them into this blog.

It’s really quite surreal going back over eight years of journal entries. Back in 2000 we didn’t use tools like Wordpress or Blogger or MySpace, we wrote our own journalling software. That’s right. From scratch. Using the barest of html, and eventually adding perl, php, css and nifty interfaces and backend mysql databases. And yes, I used either vi or emacs to code it all. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways!

And we liked it!

But after a while it got to be just too much work trying to maintain all that code; the new blogging tools were doing nifty things like pingbacks and such. And after a while it just got to be easier to let someone else maintain the code. And the styles. And let someone else worry about the security for a change.

Sometimes I wonder if that was the right decision. Maybe we shouldn’t have given up on our code so easily. (not that it was an easy decision by any measure)