It's been over 10 years since I started writing about random things on the Internet. It started with some emo poetry. Soon after, I began posting more daily journal style entries, along with photos from club events. 2003 was when I broke away from geocities, and tripod, and registered the url: theschock.com. I hosted drawings, and photos, and still typed away pretty regularly.
In the beginning, I used MovableType. Some of my friends were using that with their blogs, and swore by it. It wasn't too bad. In 2006, I was about to go to Japan for the first time as a study abroad student, and I wanted something new for my website before I left. In that summer, I installed Wordpress, and have been using that since. Wordpress was easy to install, and easy to add posts, and everything. But I never really liked it. Templates were difficult to design, and PHP is a terrible language. But, whatever. It was fine.
I vowed to completely redo this website at some point. Especially after working as a Software Developer designing and developing web applications, you'd think I would actually come up with something amazing. But no. Wordpress stayed installed and collected all the posts I wrote.
All this time I was with the same host, Collosalhost. From the very beginning in 2003, they've been hosting all my stupid crap. 2009 was the first time, I had some trouble with them. They had some massive server loss, and lost almost 50% of their customers data to some failure. They had backups for everyone, but that was the first time, after putting things on the Internet that I thought things might actually be over. I wrote about it a little bit here: May 29th, 2009. Wordpress stayed up, and I continued to be lazy. 2012 was finally when I started laying the groundwork, and created my own Tapestry 5 build free from my job.
Six months ago, Collosalhost shut down my Wordpress blog without telling me. A week or two went by and I finally emailed them and asked them what was going on. "blah blah you don't update the version, blah blah security risk." Well, it would've been nice to be notified, rather than having to ask about it. And the email continued on with its condescending patronizing attitude. Christ. This is how to treat your customers, huh?
Well today, all those dreams and ambitions have finally been realized, and I've finally redone my website completely from the ground-up! A new design, a new host, and everything is completely written from scratch in Java using Tapestry 5, Hibernate, and Tomcat.
Some of the things aren't fully implemented yet, but you can view all my posts from the last 10 years. All 612 of them from my MovableType and Wordpress blogs, plus a few more I hadn't posted yet. :)
All in all, this would be the 8th or 9th version of my website? I think.