About

History

This site has existed in a number of forms since the mid-1990's.  It started-out as many did back then: a basic "tilde user homepage" on a server at my university.  It didn't move with me when I transferred to a different school, so that one is lost to time.  I still have backups of its later incarnations before I eventually graduated.  They are quite embarrassing to my older eyes.

Sometime in 1999, I realized that what I did was probably more interesting than who I was.  So I reorganized the flat pages into more of a topic-orientated site.  It worked well enough, but posting updates was tedious.  I did it all from the backend in raw HTML, so friction was high.  It went through several visual refreshes until late 2008.

That was when I imported the content into WordPress using some scripts and hacks.  It was the fashionable thing to do at the time and I wanted to make posting easier.  WordPress was not an ideal fit, but it felt the most mature and I hoped the project would keep going.  I recreated the static pages as WP pages, organized them with a plugin, and built a category tree that matched the page hierarchy.  I then modified a theme so that it would render that page in each category before the post feed.  It felt a lot slicker than the old site, though it proved to be a bit brittle.  The bigger problems came later...

The site spent the next 18 years in WordPress.  The WordPress project is large, complex, and constantly getting bloated with features as it attempts to stay relevant.  As time went on, I found myself on the update treadmill.  The project did not have a great reputation for addressing security issues with older major releases.  So you are constantly forced to upgrade, which inevitably breaks old plugins and themes.  Between that, a couple of security incidents, and comment spam, I decided it wasn't worth the headache anymore.

After a few halfhearted attempts, I finally bit the bullet and exported the site out of the clutches of WordPress into the clutches of a static site generator called Eleventy.  It took a few weeks to get everything cleaned-up and functional, but as of 2026 the site is static again.  The goals were mainly to reduce maintenance overhead and implement a return to form against the tide of Internet walled gardens.  An SSG seems to be the happy medium between directly editing HTML and running a dynamic website.  The published output acts like a CMS and can be themed like one, but it's all static.  This also simplifies the backend: no databases or scripting engines are required, closing a number of attack vectors.