Ten Years

In the late summer of 2014 I launched a major overhaul of my site, and while its foundation and facade have evolved over the years, the content—and thus arguably the entire point—persist still.

Humble Beginnings

As is the case for many of my generation, my first websites were on GeoCities and Angelfire. I made them while in high school, in the 2002–2004 era. I recall some having lyrics, there were certainly a few blogs on LiveJournal and Blogger, and for others I have no explanation.

We all start somewhere, and that’s when and where I started putting stuff up on the web.

First Domain Registration

The very first domain I registered was themixneverdies.com in the fall of 2005. I was super excited to boot up a WordPress (v1.5!) blog on shared hosting, and while I have no real recollection about what I blogged about in those years, tinkering with web sites/apps became part of my identity.

In a sense said tinkering was far more important than any content I shared via its results. I learned about the POSIX shell beyond what was required for my computer science homework, I got my feet wet with dynamic web platforms (PHP) and databases (MySQL), and I discovered that I enjoyed it all quite a bit.

My entire professional career is easily traceable back to those humble beginnings, even if I focused on them to the detriment of my academic success at the time.

Start of nkantar.com

After registering and abandoning a non-trivial number of silly and non-silly domains, in 2009 I wanted to present myself on the web a bit more professionally, so I registered the domain I still use. As I was a design student at the time, the first iteration was my design portfolio, and maybe a contact form.

Over the next five years the backend went through a number of rebuilds, always in some form of PHP/MySQL or static HTML, but it remained a portfolio for the entire time I studied design and tried to become a professional designer.

Funnily enough, maintaining that site—and incessantly reworking various parts of it—also pushed me in the direction of my eventual profession: back to writing code.

Planting a Flag

By 2014 I’d accepted that I wasn’t going to be a designer, and had started taking a great amount of pleasure and pride in my programmer side. I was making things on the web for money, but was increasingly moving toward the backend side of things, and a portfolio of outdated school design projects wasn’t really of much use. It was time to start a blog.

And start a blog I did! I started fresh with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, which was my first meaningful use of a static site generator. Since I was doing this as part of my identity “shift” toward (or acceptance of) being a developer, I decided to mostly write about technology and just see where it takes me. To this day that’s still largely true.

Iterating

Since then, the content of the site has survived. Sure, I’ve removed and updated a post or two, and the top-level pages have come and gone, but there are currently 118 posts—well, 119 with this one—and I have no intention of doing another full overhaul like that. This is fine, and incremental improvement is fantastic.

I redesigned the site meaningfully once, in 2015, and have tried to do it a few more times, but have never landed on anything I liked well enough to adopt. Yet another redesign is currently in progress, but I’m not convinced it’ll ever see the light of day. The site is legible and has a tiny bit of personality—that’s all I really want from its visual presentation.

The backend, however, has gone through a few complete iterations:

1. The initial implementation was a static site built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.
2. The next major rewrite was a Flask based web app that loaded all posts in memory so it wouldn’t need a database, hosted on Heroku.
3. Somewhere in there I rewrote it using corvid, a simple static site generator.
4. The current version is a homemade Django based static site generator that happily runs as a Django app during development and writing, hosted on Render.

There were other, minor migrations along the way, mostly involving a change of hosting platform but not code. The content has largely remained untouched, as it’s always been in the extremely portable Markdown files.

The future doesn’t currently include any major updates, though occasionally I wonder if I’d enjoy a more web app experience, with some browser based writing workflow.

Cool Story, Bro

This was self-indulgent, I know. But I don’t really care! I realized today I’d passed the ten-year mark a week ago, and wanted to commemorate it somehow. If someone had told me back then that I’d still be at it a decade later without a major content wipe, I’d have been rightfully skeptical, given my history up to that point.

But here were are, and I think that’s pretty cool.

Here’s to another decade.

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