Title: We're Back!
Published: 2025.05.23
And we're back! Wow, has the internet changed a lot since even the last time I had this site online in 2022. And even more since I first put it online in 2009.
First things first, a little bit of advice: if you're at all considering hosting your own website, don't back it up on CDs. Sure, the multisession capability may seem like a really cool feature that you can exploit to burn just the delta between backups to reduce the number of CDs required. And sure, in 2009 your options for backup really aren't all that numerous, compared to this far-flung future year of 2025. And sure, once something better comes along you'll remember to transfer your backups over rather than putting it off and even making new backups with the same old process...
Well, I'm also quite sure any readers who might have made their way here can predict exactly what happened, combined with how little content there is left. Ah well. I'm still working through the extremely slow process of extracting as much as I can off my old disks, so old pages and assets might well show up over time. Here's hoping!
Anyways, I figure for this grand re-hosting I might as well go into some details about this site that readers might find interesting.
As mentioned, this site goes back to the year 2009. It's gone through a great many iterations over the years, but aside from two brief forays into WYSIWYG editing* I've always written everything here by hand. I've gone back and forth between serving the contents here using Apache and just writing my own webserver in C++, but given I'm yet to recover the webserver I figured it would be better to just go with Apache, at least for now.
* The more successful of the two was using Adobe Dreamweaver back in... 2012, I think? Maybe 2011. Which probably meant either Creative Suite 5 or Creative Suite 6. The less successful was a doomed exploration of using Microsoft Word (yes, really) to produce an ActiveX-based website. I don't remember what year that was exactly, but no matter when it was I should have known better than to let it go live. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to revert the change just a couple days later, but still. I've yet to find a copy of that particular version anywhere in my backups, and I'm kind of hoping I won't...
Either way, that history probably goes quite a ways towards explaining the very Web 1.0 styling of this website. I learned web development from a pair of books that I got from somewhere or other, covering HTML4 and CSS2. Fun times, but it did mean I was fairly slow to adopt <div>s rather than tables. I think I put together this particular layout some time around 2011ish, based on the timestamps on files I've been able to recover. Which makes sense, given the amount of <div> weirdness I've had to clean up just to get it to work.
But hey, it's been long enough that this probably counts as "retro" rather than "plain" or even "basic", right? I shall choose to believe that you the reader answered "yes" to that question and move on.
Overall, bringing this server back up from scratch again has really been fun. This time around I decided to go with OpenBSD rather than Debian, and as a result I'm using OpenBSD's httpd rather than Apache's httpd. This could just be my own skill growth in the meantime, I suppose, but the process was a lot more straightforward than I remember Apache being. And hey, this time I even have a domain for my server! That's definitely an improvement.
Thanks for reading this self-indulgent blog of mine. And remember: if you've got CDs with backed up data from the 2000s you really should get those transferred to at least a USB stick or something ASAP. Those things really do have a lifespan, and the lifespan of a burned CD is a lot shorter than that of a pressed CD. Ask me how I know...