Starting Fresh

A Little History

This blog is old. The oldest post here is from 2006. The posts before that were held hostage by a hosting company so I lost two years. Back then I was mainly focused on SEO and affiliate marketing. I built lists of backlinks and posted them here. I wrote posts about making money from home. One day I looked up and had an average of 1400 visitors a day. Not huge but it surprised me. But this site itself barely made a cent. It was the sites I wrote about that made money. And they did it by automation and Google gaming. So while my sites did all the work, I needed something to do and this blog was what I did, daily for a long stretch, than a few posts a week and finally in the last three years, I have only written a handful of posts.

Except for the filler posts, when I was really trying to keep up the one a day schedule, most of my posts were about what I was doing daily. Systems I had come up with or insights I had while diving into new things. It is the perfect time to write about things. You hold the door open for other newbies to follow you in, even if your eventual peers take shots at your ignorance and shun you for daring to simplify their dense jargon. Both of the books I published were on topics I learned as I wrote.

Well, the bottom feel out of the gaming Google market, at least for me. I was tired of it. It was too much like work and if I have to work, I am going to enjoy it by building and creating things. Money had deceived me into believing I actually enjoyed what I was doing. So I shifted to development, which I had already been doing. But I took myself completely out of marketing, SEO or otherwise. And for a while, that meant web development. And web development is enough for a while, but then it gets old. It is also not very interesting to write about. If it had been, there would have been a lot more posts in the last three years. My world. My rules. I get to pick what is interesting and what is not.

It took a few job changes and life changes to have things interesting enough to write about again.

Jekyll

I am tired of overkill. This blog has been on Moveable Type, Wordpress, Wordpress MU, back to Wordpress and then to Drupal. It’s a fucking blog. I write posts and they go on the internet. Period. Yes, there’s some other shit involved. But I realized I was running this thing on a VPS because it would white page on shared hosting. And I don’t get 1400 visitors a month any more. I get about 50.

I’m half German but fuck the overengineering. I am writing in Sublime right now. When I am done, I will run a jekyll command and it will be uploaded to my site. And guess what, risk of SQL injection 0%. I don’t have to wait for all the javascript to load on the WYSIWYG editor. I don’t have to update half a dozen modules, themes or plugins every time I log in and then forget I was there to write a post.

Done.

Moving Forward

Well, considering I have shades of this post a couple of other times in the last three years, it remains to be seen whether I will continue or not. But I had to get this out of the way to write what I really want to write.