CmdrTaco is here.

Thanks to Zeldman and Christie for hooking me up with a wordpress setup to play with.  As I said to them, I spent 2 decades working on various forms of CMS both before and after Slashdot- the idea of spending my ‘fun’ time developing any sort of content management tooling has quite literally zero appeal.

I hosted my own WordPress for several years, but as anyone who knows me can attest, I am not the most diligent of systems administrator.  At some point the system got hacked and I just took the whole thing down.  I had put some effort into a custom skin and had hacked apart a few plugins to do minor things, but I didn’t really care much either way.

Primarily the site hosted a bunch of old photos, some short stories, as well as a blog series that I was writing about a news platform I was thinking about at the time.  That platform never really happened (although all these years later, the problems I was describing remain unsolved).

For now, I intend to use this place as a dumping ground for my ramblings.  Previously I posted a few entries on Medium, which is ‘fine’ I guess.  I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about it either way… the editor is quite nice.  I still find it somewhat amazing how far editing text as come from a <TEXTAREA> field in the mid 90s.  I know a lot of people have hostility towards Medium, from its paywall metering thing to just simply being a 3rd party system that could possibly shut down at any moment… but in theory a word press setup like this one can be exported.

Of course, all that assumes I have something to say… which remains to be seen.

I expect that my next few entries will be related to research connected to a sort of ‘History of Slashdot’ project that I have had in the back of my mind for a few months.  I don’t know if the end result is a blog series, book, or Oscar Award nominated film for Best Documentary, but I’m going to try to document it a bit along the way and see what happens.  I’m especially hoping that by airing some of this publicly I can take advantage of some of you assholes to fact check me.  Or even provide research!

So far, digging back through my ancient history has been fun.  I’v been waxing nostalgic on twitter about interesting tidbits from Slashdot history that I probably haven’t broadly shared before. More to come… but let me be clear: Pants remain optional.