I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word billions, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
- Carl Sagan (The Burden of Skepticism)
Welcome to my new blog and this, the obligatory welcome post. I began this whole stupid blog thing a couple years ago when blogs were still called 'weblogs' and they were still used to document progress on a developer's project(s). Now-a-days they're used for basically anything and everything, and though at first I detested it, I've now found a ridiculous amount of energy for wasting everyone's time with boring details about my opinions on basically everything.
I started by constructing my own blog using PHP. At this stage I hadn't even heard of MySQL and I was actually considering using a flat-file system for storing posts. Thankfully I moved into the big wide world of databases and things started to become more realistic. I developed my first blog (still called weblog, I refused to abbreviate) and called it something ridiculously plain like "Nick's Weblog" or something. I don't remember and frankly I'm happy to keep it that way. At that time proper OOP hadn't been implemented into PHP - PHP v5.0 was certainly no more than a rumour. I'm pretty sure the actual programming behind my blog was disgracefully procedural. Which is fine in some circumstances, but really... this was ridiculous.
Sure enough I kept playing around and developed my first object oriented blog! It had classes! It had post objects, comment objects, user objects, page objects... But it was still shit. It was fun to play around with though, and I felt a certain amount of pride for what I had accomplished with my meager PHP skills.
The object oriented version of my blog went through a huge number of revisions and rewrites and still mostly exists today at http://users.bhills.net/~gnack/. I don't update there, and my domain name 'gnackattack.com' is currently down due to a distinct lack of payments to my host on my behalf.
Fast forward to today, and here I am at work looking for something to do. I now have a full time job as database support for a software development company. Because of this I don't have a lot of spare time and what spare time I do have I prefer to spend away from the machines that plague my 9 -5 existence. The solution? A premade blogging site. I have indeed sunk to all new depths! Hopefully I can at least make an effort to keep this updated.
4 comments:
Whoooaaaa... I'm currently posting as Pamela and I didn't even have to log in or anything special like that?! Dude! It's psychic! It knows me already!
My main reason for commenting was my pure excitement that I knew things about weblogs and MYSQL and PHP. You lost me at OOP. But I'm cool with that! Because I'm a music student! I don't need techie webby terminology!
Lovely new blog, Nick. I shall attempt to remember to check it!
Oh noes. My name doesn't have the initial letter-capitalisation.
*frown*
Ah yeah, it turns out Google now own Blogger so it will automatically log you in if you come straight from Gmail. Nifty! I was impressed when I first noticed it too!
Ahhh wow. That's kind of amazing. That also explains why I'm already logged in as Pamela when I'm using the eMac at uni! Creepy, creepy.
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