Hello World

by Jon Sullivan - 2019-08-23 - Status

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Relaunching JonSullivan.com after years of assuming there was a better way. Turns out there wasn't. Crap.

I started blogging around 1996. At first it was just a bunch of html that I would swap out every few days, with every post being another html file. The wild west, and I loved it. Then I moved on to PHP and a database to generate pages dynamically. That pretty quickly evolved into me writing my own blog/CMS framework. It wasn't WordPress. But it was pretty snazzy, and it was all mine. These days it would be very crappy code, but back then it was good enough to get me a couple full-time programming jobs.

After a few years, blogging got steamrolled by "social media" and the whole idea of a blog started to look quaint and wee. Bloggers had invented social media, and social media killed blogging. Everyone was on Facebook, and then Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Trying to speak to the world via my tiny homebrewed homepage stopped making much sense. So I embraced the shiny new future and jumped to Google+.

In my opinion G+ was awesome. Especially compared to Facebook, which IMHO was pure evil from the start. But apparently only I and a few hundred other people felt that way. So Google shit-canned it and suggested if I wanted to speak to the world I should learn to produce slick click-baity videos and use YouTube.

Yeah. No. Fuck that.

I tried Facebook, but it feels like the worst thing ever done to communication, as well as being a great tool for spying and social manipulation. I tried other sites, but none of them were close to what I needed. What I needed was an old school blog.

So, in the words of Thanos, "Fine. I'll do it myself".

So here we are. Come full circle. New homebrewed codebase. No crappy re-sampled photos. No corporation making years of content go "poof". Let's fire it up and see what this baby can do.

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