Fifteen years ago today (ok, fifteen years and a few days) I launched this little blog with the idea of trying to help others as well as myself. I've long believed that if I struggled with something then I needed to write it down to help myself remember what I figured out. That strategy has served me well I think and nearly 6000 posts later (currently at 5939 actually) I'm still enjoying this little mass of content I've created.

The initial version was entirely my own and written in ColdFusion. I based the design on... some other blog design that I honestly can't remember. It wasn't very pretty, but it worked:

Ugly or not, my third blog post was a link to download the source code. This was long before GitHub, even RIAForge, so I simply linked to the source code for folks to download and asked for feedback. The code, BlogCFC, turned into quite a project. It was in use by over 800 different blogs and grew quite powerful. I eventually "retired" from it but I'm very proud of what it became.

This site eventually moved to WordPress, which is a powerful engine, but also one that requires a bit of love to keep it happy. I then switched to simple static file hosting so I could simply deploy and not think about it.

Over these past fifteen years, I have been very lucky with my readers. I've had a lot of comments (nearly 60K, thank you Disqus for not making that easy to find out) and very few trolls. I've gotten a lot of support and help. I've said this before and I'll say it again, thank you for being here, thank you for participating, and thank you for being awesome.

I'll end with something I got a bit famous(infamous?) for - my Amazon Wishlist. If you've found this content helpful and want to show your support, please visit the list and bill your boss for it. I'll definitely appreciate it. :)

Header photo by Wang Xi on Unsplash