This website is exactly what it says. Nothing more. Nothing less. One Big Experiment. It’s a collaboration of random knowledge that I’ve accumulated over time. It’s a nostalgic throwback to the days when I created my first website. It’s a personal reference of code snippets, tutorials, and random useful things I can come back to when my brain farts out.
My original website was a hand coded portfolio of everything I was learning at the time. Built from the ground up with not much more than a text editor, Gimp, a little bit of MySpace layout tweaking knowledge and an old tower with some terribly outdated hardware. Here is the only existing screenshot I have left of sudofry.homelinux.com and let me tell you it was not that pretty when I first started. My first several designs were just horrible, but I was improving with each attempt. This image was the final design before I moved on to WordPress.
I mainly ended up moving to a WordPress blog for 3 specific reasons.
1 – Security – The original site was hosted on a tower in the middle of my living room. It was on the same network as all of my other machines and at that time I had quite a few. I was new to Linux and web design and computers in general.
2 – Mobile Friendly Design – It was a time of cross browser compatibility nightmares and smartphones were starting to become a thing. It was bad enough trying to get my newly learned hand coding skills to display the same in multiple browsers on both Windows and Linux, but then trying to make it compatible with my Blackberry and every other type of smartphone that was coming out soon after was a lot of extra work.
3 – Time – My daughter was still very young and I was a single father. I found myself working a lot of overtime to make ends meet. I spent so much time working on the design of the website and trying to keep up with everything that goes along with it, that I just didn’t have the time to actually write tutorials anymore. Any free time I did have needed to be spent with my daughter because I knew she wasn’t going to be little forever.
Finally, I made the switch to WordPress and it did make things a lot easier. But I just reached a point where I needed a break from it all. I wanted to spend more time learning and less time teaching what I had learned. I figured if other people wanted to learn those things, they could go research it like I did. Not to mention the fact that I wanted that old, outdated junk tower that I called a server out of my living room.
Why did I restart this blog? Well, there are several reasons. For the first time ever, I have a decently powerful machine that can run most anything. I have more free time than I used to. I have friends and co-workers who are starting to get into Linux and I think some of the info that’s still rattling around inside my brain might be able to help them out a bit. And I have to admit, having most of my notes and references in one place that I can access from anywhere is pretty nice. If I can help out some other people in the process, that’s just an added bonus.
Most of all… I miss doing it. I really enjoyed the whole experience, as overwhelming and stressful as it may have been. I have a lot of geek in me that needs to resurface and get back to doing what it was meant to do. A lot of things have changed since I first got into this. Code has changed. Resources have changed. I have some research to do just to get back to where I once was. And if this interests you in any way, you are welcome to join me.
