Yet Another Web Site. I have created, deleted, and maintained so many websites since my first one in 1994 that it’s a bit ridiculous. I guess I like the fun of getting these set up, I blogged professionally for many years, and now it keeps my retired self busy.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the “About” page (click that link in the upper right corner of this page), here’s what I’m doing:
LifeBits is my Substack blog where I am creating an online history of my life in tech from the very early days in the 1960s when I was a kid.
LifeBitsBlog (this website) is the self-hosted (on a Raspberry Pi!) blog you’re currently reading where I will keep everyone up to date on my current tech projects. I can’t help myself; I just love to write and I like playing with technology. There’s a lot I’m doing right now and it just doesn’t fit the intended audience for LifeBits.
I’ll write a bit more about the content management system (Joomla) that I’m using to run this site in a future post. But that image at top? That's what I was doing 30 years ago in the web space. Yeah, it is a bit on the retro side of things, but it provides context…
Apple’s Newton MessagePad totally rocked my life between 1993 and 1999, the latter year being when Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped found and killed the personal digital assistant (PDA). I was doing some very basic development for the Newton, and needed a way to sell that software. My website was a play on PDA and the fact that my wife often refers to me as being pedantic: PDAntic.com. The site went up in 1994, and I “rebuilt it” from a really crappy site to a slightly less crappy site in 1996.
Be gentle when you look at that old site in the image at the top of this post. It was developed with the piece of lousy software known as Microsoft FrontPage, and that was “state of the art” in 1996 when the site was scraped by the Wayback Machine.
It's amazing -- to me, at least -- to think that 32 years after I created my first website, I'd be running a website on a "server" that is available for less than $200 yet has much more power than a large workgroup server of 1994.