At this point, I’ve posted so many columns that the information about this site was buried at the bottom of a very long home page. I thought I’d give it a column of its own.
content management through the ages
I’ve had a presence on the internet since 1996. Back then my sites were hand-hewn HTML made with a little help from Nisus Writer and later BBEdit. I had fun with it, but I found that maintaining the sites — and particularly adding new content — became somewhat tedious.
I decided to try some content management software, and in 2005 tried the TWiki collaboration platform. It was an improvement for maintaining the content, but keeping the platform itself running was a nightmare. In addition, I thought that the aesthetics of the TWiki sites left something to be desired.
In 2018, I moved risley.net, sacmedoasis.com, twoprops.net, and looseassociations.com to WordPress. The platform was much easier to maintain and visually attractive, but the software base itself was huge and horribly complex, and uses technologies (PHP, mySQL) that I don’t really like to expose to the net if I don’t have to. Worse was the fact that WordPress seems to be moving inexorably toward supporting more commercial “web designers” instead of small-web proponents who want to quickly and easily maintain simple, independent, ad-free sites. I found, particularly after “improvements” to their editor, I had reached the point where I dreaded adding a post to any of my sites for fear of encountering another new WordPress feature that would make the experience even more frustrating.
I retired from my medical practice two years ago, but am still maintaining a lot of IT infrastructure. I have been itching to start more stream-of-consciousness sort of posting, but WordPress was just putting too many barriers in my way. I started looking for solutions that would let me just throw together quick posts in an offline text editor using Markdown. That, then, is what this site is. I’m trying out Quartz as my content management system.
Still no ads. No tracking (though I now see that Quartz is loading some Javascript resources from Cloudflare, which I will try to relocate to a server under my control). No animations, pop-ups, and minimal (but still too much) Javascript. Minimal graphics and no logos. Lightweight.
The twoprops Minecraft Server information site is available, staticized, at archive.twoprops.net, but is no longer maintained. I am leaving some of the Minecraft servers up for nostalgic reasons, in spite of feeling guilty about using energy for it (we’ll be 100% off-grid solar in a few months).
My other sites are still on WordPress (except QRazy.fun, which is a truly lightweight hand-crafted, Javascript-free site). I’ll probably be staticizing the ones that don’t change much, and keep the legacy WordPress sites offline to use as static-site generators.
Thanks for visiting.
stalking twoprops
The very best way to follow twoprops.net is by using RSS. Most RSS readers will find the link automatically if you just enter twoprops.net, but the full link is https://twoprops.net/index.xml — happy following!
An alternative if you’re not into RSS is to follow me on Mastodon at https://defcon.social/@twoprops, but I’m not yet syndicating this site so you’ll rarely see me post on Mastodon unless/until I decide to syndicate.
Question or comment?
Send an email to twoprops @ this site’s domain.