10 Year Anniversary
It just dawned on me that I’ve had this blog going for 10 years! I felt it was necessary to at least post something on this milestone, especially considering I never thought this would happen.
This was probably my 4th, maybe 5th, attempt at creating a blog. I can remember back in 1999/2000, I started a Livejournal page. I also thought it was weird because it pretty much was just a public journal- as the name suggested. So, that didn’t last too long. Back in the pre-Google days I was all in with Yahoo- email, briefcase (the OG ‘Cloud Storage‘), and of course GeoCities. I created a GeoCities page and pretty much held onto that for a couple of years. I actually attempted to turn that into my homegrown blog. Needless to say, that didn’t last long.
Fast forward to college and my university provided each student their own web hosting directory. I would say probably 95% of students had no idea about this. So I built a website using Macromedia Dreamweaver from scratch using some basic HTML & CSS and threw it up on my free web hosting site. And again, attempted to create my own blog. It really didn’t make much sense as each blog entry was its own dedicated web page. For starters, I felt I didn’t have really anything to say, but most importantly it was a nightmare to maintain!
Ahhh, then there was Blogger, Google had recently acquired Blogger and it started to blow up. You guessed it, that blog I created pretty much went nowhere… In fact, I’m sure I created 2 blogs- a personal one and a photography one. Again, both blogs essentially were neglected and didn’t make sense to keep.
In the 2004-05 timeframe I got really big into open source CMS frameworks and began to build websites for people and small businesses. I still had my Blogger sites, but not much was happening with them. The ways of creating sites from scratch was not sustainable. I discovered e107 and it was game on! This is when I really got big into the LAMP stack and really learned PHP and MySQL. For several years I must of built at least 100 websites for various people, businesses, or other random reasons, including a business website for my parents embroidery business. I started with e107, moved to Drupal and even dipped my toes in the .NET world with DotNetNuke.
I had heard of WordPress around a similar time of hearing about Blogger, but at that point in time I had gone with the ‘new’ Google product. Fast forward to 2011 and I recently learned of the newer .me TLD web domains and I figured to jump on it sooner than later. I’ve been trying to acquire abrom.com since 2005 and most probably won’t get it (that’s a whole different story…). So I figured let me grab abrom.me and lock it in while I can. At the time GoDaddy was one of the few registrars that supported the TLD, even though I was highly dependent on 1&1 Hosting at the time (eventually acquired by IONOS). Since I was very comfortable with building and developing PHP based websites I opted to self-host my new WordPress blog.
January 2011 abrom.me was born and here we are! So, here’s to 10 years!!
Cheers! 🥂