jmoiron.net

Happy Anniversary to me!

6 years ago I started my blog on the now defunct IRIX server attila.stevens-tech.edu. The first post in this blog was made with a bash script that basically used cat & sed to style a quasi-structured text file that I'd shell into the server and create. The server did not offer any CGI services (for fear that the students would screw up and bring down the server, which also handled email), so it would be a year or so until I was able to move my website to PHP.

From there, I wrote two versions of jmoiron.net using the classic LAMP stack. The second one used PEAR:DB for database safety, a thin home-grown templating system based in PHP (both heavily inspired by jeremy mikola).

In May, 2003, I started to learn the Python programming language (This was the beginning of my summer vacation for the Junior->Senior year of University). My very first mention of the language in these hallowed pages was, well, completely retarded: I was "gonna write an interpreter, or a C compiler, or something." It's funny ha-ha.

By late 2004/early 2005, I had ditched the PHP beginnings and had written some custom mod_python stuff to run the site. I ditched mysql at the same time. By late 2005/early 2006, I started writing my own plain-text -> HTML markup language based on MoinMoin syntax. I had almost my whole database converted (automatically) to this script when, in mid 2006, I traded manual mod_py for django and my markup language to markdown.

I quickly ditched the first iteration of the django site and ended up with what you see today; It's been here for over a year and a half! It was by far the harshest transition, because I also made a switch from storing my posts as HTML to storing them as markdown (which I am, of course, now unhappy with); and back then the automagic html->markup filters left a bit to be desired. I am working on yet another iteration with yet another set of technologies; the next iteration (probably set to finish around April) won't even involved SQL at all, and will be the first one without a real solid framework since I moved to Django.

This site is kind of a technical experiment of mine; It's where I express myself both through code, through design, and through words. Hopefully sometime soon, through pictures too. I hope that it will continue to be something that I can hang out there to dissuade future employers from hiring me!