Miscellaneous ramblings about the site, by the author.
Hey folks, welcome to Iansweb.com! I started this site way back in 1998 or so. It’s gone through several renditions over the years, but somehow, it’s still up and running. When I started this site, it was just a place for me to put the links I liked. I had several pages, all sorted by category. Eventually I started posting snippets of news about my life. It became a blog that was updated by hand. After about a year or so, I started using Movable Type, which was free for use, but registered users got preferred treatment when it came to support.
As time progressed, I started getting into the blogging. As I started posting more personal items that I didn’t really want the business world reading, I started using LiveJournal more and more. For a while, I was posting to both simultaneously, but as I started reading LJ more, it became easier to just post to LiveJournal than to iansweb.com’s MT interface and I pretty much stopped posting here. The week before Christmas 2006, the server that iansweb.com was on took a turn for the worse and suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. My most recent backup of my home directory was from August 29th, but the most recent export of the iansweb.com MT database was from November 2005 with posts as recent as October 2005. Sadly, there were only 15 newer entries on the site since. Yeah, I’d been lazy.
In the process of trying to get set up again, I had issues with Movable Type (or so I thought – they later turned out to be permissions issues on the filesystem), and decided to give WP a try. After all, if two of my friends who were geeks were using it, it can’t be that bad, can it? (Coincidentally, both tried MT but ended up using WP.) The management is fairly easy. Everything is modular, to a point. Since most themes are done in 100% CSS, redesigning the look, feel, and layout of the site is a snap. It’s a work in progress to be sure. I’m learning the tag syntax and structure, and playing with lots of themes. It’s a work in progress, and you may not get the same theme on consecutive page clicks, but the heart is still the same. So take a look around, read a bit, and get to know me. I don’t bite, honest. I hope you enjoy your stay here on the site as much as I’ve enjoyed building it.
Update 2023: I had a couple years with the site completely offline because the server it was on was old and vulnerable to attacks. I ended up shelving things until several years ago when I decided to set it up again on a hosted vm. I got things migrated by importing an exported XML with all the data, but it wasn’t perfect. I let it sit for another four years before rebuilding the vm altogether. Learing how to get it working again was a fun project that took me a few days to complete, but in the end, I’ve got it back up and running.
—Ian…