Looking Back at 20 Years of the Site
There is an analogy that someone made once, "Life is like a roll of toilet paper, the longer you are around, the faster it goes". I am sure this is mostly accurate. Time is a funny thing when you truly think about it because time, as we know it, is a man-made concept. Yes, it does follow the cycle of the planet and the stars, but overall, what we define as "time" is a man-made idea. Our lives are dictated by the clock. Time is a vague concept that we each experience at our own rates. I am pretty confident that at some points, everyone finds that time drags, and yet at other times, it seems that time goes by in the blink of an eye. While time varies on a moment-to-moment basis, it adds up, and ultimately, a great length of time can pass without truly realizing it.
It is weird to think that my blog is now over 20 years old. I know for a fact that I have had a blog more than 20 years ago because the first post that I have on here states that I started all over, meaning that there was a version before. I attempted to see if I could find an older version, but the first pull of the site by archive.org is a few months after the site started. Over the last 20 years, the site has gone through a number of changes, including hosting providers, software that powers it, the layout, and of course, the type of content that I post.
Infrastructure
The hosting services that I have used have been varied. I started out using a computer and hosting it at home (yes, I’m that much of a nerd). It was also a different time, when ISPs actually permitted things like that. I was using that setup until November of 2006 when I moved to an actual hosting provider, GoDaddy. When I had GoDaddy, it was basically shared hosting of 200MB of storage and 2.5GB of transfer. At the time, it was adequate for my needs. Shared hosting is good in some ways, but limiting in others. Because I needed additional access, I ended up moving to a different hosting provider, called MediaTemple.
I know I ended up moving to MediaTemple, but I honestly do not really know when that was. I suspect that it was sometime around 2008 or 2009. I do not have any bills or emails for them from that time. I used MediaTemple until I ended up switching to another service provider, Linode.
Even though I do not know when I switched to MediaTemple, I do know when I switched from MediaTemple to Linode. I switched back in August of 2013. Coincidentally, GoDaddy ended up acquiring MediaTemple just two months later, in October of 2013. Since August of 2013, I have hosted my sites on Linode. Linode is designed as a virtual server environment. This means that you will need to know how to manage a server. Managing a server is not for everyone, but it is something that I do not mind doing, and it allows for more control over the server, but it also comes with additional responsibility. I do not anticipate switching away from Linode, but it is entirely possible that I might switch at some point, but I do not have any plans to do so. Now, let’s move to software.
Software
A server is just one aspect of a website. It also needs some sort of software to display a website. The bare minimum needed is a webserver, of some sort. Today, there are a variety of web server options, including LightHTTP, Jetty, Apache, and Nginx. When I first started my website, there were many fewer options. Due to its ubiquity, I started with Apache. However, the Apache Webserver has become quite mature, and was initially released in 1996. While I initially used Apache, I have since moved to using Nginx as my webserver of choice. I opted to use Nginx because I found it to be faster than Apache’s HTTP server on the same hardware.
I have been creating websites, and programming in general, since 1997. While I started out creating static webpages, I have, as you might have surmised, moved onto making dynamic websites. My first dynamic sites were using Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), now called Classic ASP. I went with this because it is what I could easily find resources for at the time. It was a few years later when I switched away from using ASP, to using PHP. Again, I do not recall when this actually occurred, but I suspect it was sometime around late 2004, which would’ve been the PHP 4.3.4 era.
As for software that actually powers the website, that has changed over time. Over the years I have had three different software packages to power my site. I used a piece of software called "Pivot Log" for a couple of years, but then on May 7th, 2007 I moved to WordPress. I continued to use it for more than 15 years, until October 2022.
As outlined in my post Rebuilding the site: Moving away from WordPress that I posted on October 28th, 2022, I published an entirely rebuilt version of my website. Now, it is a statically generated site. This effectively means that the pages are generated once and then published to my web server, which will then serve the pages as they were generated. Static webpages are generally faster than dynamic ones. If you think about it, even briefly, it makes sense. All you have to do is read the page from the a disk. Each file is small, so it should not take very long. Besides the speed, static sites do not require much software upkeep, besides the server software. Static sites, of course, have downsides as well, because any change requires a complete rebuild of the site. Let us now turn to the content of the website.
Content
As mentioned above, there has been a variety of content posted on the site. It has ranged from site-related updates, life updates, news, thoughts, and of course, Apple-related content. When I moved away from WordPress to my current static site, I ended up removing some posts, mostly the Daily Run Down items. The reason I removed these was because many of the links were no longer valid. Additionally, the news posts were of their time and no longer relevant.
Along with this, I did remove some additional posts. These were posts that were videos. These posts were removed for two reasons. Either the views were removed from YouTube or the posts were removed from their source sites; therefore, it was prudent to remove these posts. I also did remove some of my older posts because they are no longer ones that I want on the site.
I am not sure what additional content might be posted in the future. As you might have noticed, the frequency of content has changed over the years. I opted to do a look at the number of posts, and there have been a number of months where I did not post much at all. Most notably between September and November of 2009. But, that was a busy time with buying a house. Other months, though, have been quite busy. October 2015 and October 2021 are the busiest with 41 posts in each month. A majority of the posts for these months were my "Device Availability" posts. These posts are ones that track the current availability of Apple devices. A majority of the time, it is the iPhone, but it has also been the iPad.
I have done my Device Availability posts for a number of years and these are, mostly, automated. The posting is not, but the data gathering is automated. When I first began posting, the data gathering was entirely manual and I ended up switching to automatic retrieval so I could have more detailed information. I have not yet decided if I will continue doing the Device Availability posts the next time a new device is released. If I do, it would need to be a device that can be easily tracked, like the iPhone or iPad. Macs are not easily tracked due to the sheer number of options that Apple has. iPhone and iPads have a number of options, but these are color and size, not processors. Let us now look at distributing content.
Syndication
I have never considered my site to be a "must visit" and destination site. My site is not a news aggregator nor is it popular enough for people to have as their homepage. In order for people to see my content, I need to post it to places. Over the course of time, this has changed.
When I first started my site, Google would be the way that people found my site. And for a while, I do think people used that to find it. However, I also started posting to other sites, in particular, social media.
For the longest time, I posted to Twitter, but that stopped when I stopped using the site due to the change in ownership. Beyond this, they decided to down-rank posts with links in them; thus making it more difficult to get reach for a post. I also used to post to Facebook, but they stopped allowing people to post to their personal Facebook profiles, via the API, back in April of 2018. You can still post to a Facebook Page, but I do not have a Facebook page. I have stopped using Facebook; I deactivated my account back in February after not logging into it for like six weeks.
The other place that I have posted to is Apple News. I use this because a vast majority of my posts are about Apple, so it would make sense. I am not sure if I will continue using this. It is not because it is difficult to create an Apple News compatible file; I have a custom script that will do so. The big reason I do not know if I will continue is because I do not get many views when I post. So, I am not sure if it makes sense to continue to post there or not.
Posting to sites was made a bit easier when I was using WordPress, because there were plugins that took care of the functionality for me. These would post when I hit the "publish" button. Additionally, updates would automatically be made if I updated the posting. Now, I have to handle all of this manually.
These days I post to both Mastodon and Bluesky. I have created custom code that I use to post to these sites. I have two tags in the metadata info of each of my markdown files that will pull the text to use for posting the summarization of what I post.
Since the inception of my blog, one way to consume the posts has been RSS. To this day, my site has an RSS feed. If you have some sort of aggregator, feel free to follow using your favorite RSS reader.
Closing Thoughts
It surely does not seem like it has been 20 years. I honestly do not know if the site will be around in 20 years. If I’m still around, it’s likely that the site will be as well. I do have a few ideas for some changes, but I am not sure when those changes will happen. One thing is for certain: the site has not stayed the same over the last 20 years; it has seen significant changes. It is quite likely that I will continue to post and make changes to the site. 20 years from now, if the site is still around, it will undoubtedly look completely different from its current iteration. But only time will ultimately tell what changes the site will have in the future.