Blast from the Past

Back in 2008, I had the desire to start a blog, primarily due to a friend’s site. At that point, I had never written any web based code, CSS, javascript, etc. Instead of setting up a WordPress account (which would have been forward thinking…), I decided to build a website and blog from the ground up using PHP, MySQL, and hosting it on a “server” in my room.

It was an interesting experience creating some rudimentary CSS styling, no javascript, and a basic blogging platform where I manually wrote posts in HTML inside phpMyAdmin. I ran into a lot of random issues, like my site counter not recognizing the same person returning to the site, needing pagination, creating thumbnails, creating my own commenting system, and trying to figure out how to stop spam comments (solution: turn off the commenting system).

This blog has been off the internet for quite a while, but now that I have some hosting space I am able to make the site available again. For the record, wget is an awesome utility I used to point at the database driven site a long time ago to create a completely static version of html files and images.

Without further ado, here is the original blog: http://michaelwelburn.com/v1