The Webs I’ve Spun

For a long time now, I’ve been looking for a new content management system for my website. Over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of solutions and never found one that I found to be a satisfying solution. Finally, I think I may have found something I don’t absolutely hate.

In the beginning, there was Geocities. Back in those days, GeoCities websites were broken down into “cities” and addresses. For example, a URL may have looked something like http://www.geocities.com/broadway/1138. My first website was somewhere under /broadway/. I believe I used a GeoCities tool to generate the HTML. Later, for some reason I don’t remember, I relocated to /SiliconValley/. By that point, I had started tinkering with HTML and created my website with some shareware website authoring tool for Windows 3.1, though mainly writing my own HTML. This was back before CSS, kids.

Time passed. I learned Linux. I bought a domain or eight. By this point, I had learned PHP. I created a new website and self-hosted it on my Linux desktop at home. It used a mixture of HTML and PHP, though it was all within the same file. Eventually, I moved to FreeBSD and the website moved as well. Over time, I added some CSS into the page. I also migrated towards XHTML, I think. This page hung around for quite a while, and was only replace in the last year or two.

Next up, Drupal. I got a web hosting provider to host my website. I deployed on Drupal 6 and tweaked it over time. Drupal is very complicated, so it kept me busy customizing things to my liking. When Drupal 7 was in beta, I migrated over to it and pretty much had to start all over again. While Drupal is highly customizable, it ended up burning me out. It was just too big and unwieldy. So, I experimented with Joomla, concrete5, WordPress, and a pile of other CMSes.

And finally, to the point! After all that experimentation, I have decided to stick with WordPress for now. So, I’ve redone my website for yet another time. This time, WordPress. I am liking it so far, but we’ll see how it goes. If you have any WordPress tips, please send them my way.