More and more recently I have decided to move away from social media. I haven't logged into Twitter for years, my Facebook account isn't available to me, I poke at Instagram every now and then (but rarely post). I post on LinkedIn, but that is a more "professional" place to post articles and my experiences building websites.
I do frequent Mastodon (follow me at https://fosstodon.org/@philipnorton42) quite often, and that has become my "go to" social media site. Although, I've not been posting much there either.
I therefore decided to dig out my old blog, convert it to some form of flat file site (I chose HydePHP by the way), and start writing personal posts again.
This blog has existed in a few different forms over the last 20 or so years. I first started it when I was learning PHP back in 2004-2005. I created a blog application called BlogiPHP using XML files as the back end data store, which worked really well. Then I discovered WordPress in 2006 and move everything over to that.
I kept writing the odd post here and there until around 2012 when I decided to stop hosting the site altogether. I think it was because I was writing on #! code so much, but also because my hosting provider at the time went out of business and I didn't want to spend time moving the site.
Since then it's been sat as a database dump on a hard drive in my desk drawer ever since.
Recently, I've been reading posts on the site Bubbles, which is a ranking site for around 5024 personal blogs. It's been a real pleasure to read posts on random subjects from random people, who are just writing content for the sheer pleasure of writing content. This got me thinking about the blog sat in my desk drawer, so I've spent a few evenings recently getting the data and sorting things out.
HydePHP seems to be a decent way of creating a site, it even has a built in post editor that is quite handy. Creating posts can be done via the command line, a dashboard interface, or by dropping markdown files into the correct directory. I've managed to override a few things and it seems quite powerful.
Looking back over the posts I've written over the years it chronicles my move from Wales to Cheshire for work, my first car being stolen and written off, my son growing up and being awesome.
I'm still planning on writing code over at #! code (that isn't stopping) but I will be using this site to post more non-code stuff, or stuff that doesn't quite fit in with the content over there.