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title: Site History
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Though I had profiles on various BBSes and servers as early as 1986, I didn't establish my first web page until 1994 when [Nyx](http://www.nyx.net/history.html) established userpages.[^ncsa] Mine featured my [geek code](http://www.geekcode.com/).

[^ncsa]: Yes, that was before Netscape. I used NCSA Mosaic on Macintosh and Lynx on OSF/1 AXP (the Unix on our school's DEC Alpha).

A year later I registered phobia.com, and in 1996 put a site up via a local ISP advertising my web development services.[^phobia] Though gainful employment eventually replaced "phobia consulting", I still used the site as a personal homepage until in 2003 I decided to [call it a blog](/2003/03/14/first-post.html).

[^phobia]: Inspired by [Philip Greenspun](http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming), I had picked up [PHP/FI](http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php) and built a few dynamic sites in the late 1990s. My favorite client was [Crown Candy](http://crowncandykitchen.net/), who bartered for meals and chocolate.

That same year, I started using [iBlog](/2003/04/21/iblog.html) to publish in a structured way, but being a server-side web architect, I was eager to try new tools. After [flirting with blojsam](/2003/05/29/phonetic-nightmares.html), I settled on [SnipSnap](http://snipsnap.org/space/phobia) mostly because it was growing to support Groovy, and I was newly [interested in Ruby](/2003/05/28/scripting.html) which wasn't very mature for web work yet. Some years later I grew bored and migrated to XWiki, then [gave in to the Wordpress hegemony](/2006/04/09/wordpress-it-is.html) in 2006.

Ringing in 2007, I sold the domain name and [moved to a new hostname](/2007/01/20/fearless.html).[^si] Ever since then, I've endeavoured to [maintain permanent URLs](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) for the long web.

[^si]: I still felt the need for a "brand" of some sort, and soon began using [safelyignored.com](/2007/01/29/this-blog-is-now-safely-ignored.html). In late 2009 I finally accepted the value of my unique name and have embraced it online.

Wordpress served me well enough, but when I was [fireballed](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/31/gerwitz) in 2010 it just couldn't handle the load (on memory) and my site spent most of the day unable to respond. Caching and optimizing made me comfortable for a while, but that Ruby itch finally got too strong. So in 2012 I went back to static[^JAMstack], first with [nanoc](/2012/02/20/reset.html) and later to [Middleman](http://www.middlemanapp.com/), which had a stronger community and I deployed for many projects at The Artificial.
[^JAMstack]: Before static was [cool again](https://jamstack.org/).

In 2018, I built Sitewriter to take back control over my "tweets", adding the [/notes](/notes/) section. Then in 2019, frustration with bit rot for Ruby projects and mothballing the agency's projects motivated me to reset to the setup described at [/site](/site/).

<!-- Even more information about the history of this site might be found in [meta posts](/writing/categories/meta.html). -->
