From “Strayhorn” to “Powell”

I had a brief conversation with Matthew on the Slack #forums channel that spurred some memories about what I think was my earliest use of WordPress.

A #forums Slack conversation I had with Matthew.

Back in February of 2005, Matt Mullenweg introduced “Strayhorn” and released WordPress 1.5 to the world.

Announcing WordPress 1.5

(This is my favorite part of what I do.) To the 12,126 of you who have already downloaded WordPress 1.5, congrats for being on the ball. We had a “soft launch” on Monday the 14th while we worked out some infrastructure issues and we’re now very ready to announce WordPress 1.5 to the world. This release is named “Strayhorn” in honor of Billy Strayhorn the pianist and sublime composer who worked closely with Duke Ellington and wrote tunes like “Take the A Train” and “Lush Life.” We thought he was perfect to represent the power and elegance of this release, which has been under intense development and testing the past few months.

I’m not sure I can definitively say that “Strayhorn” was my first use of WordPress, but it’s certainly a moment in WordPress’ history that I can definitely remember. Pages were introduced, the plugin repository became a thing and theme templates continued to evolve as did spam mitigation. I was so impressed with Kubrick (the default template for WordPress) and then Michael Heilemann rolled out K2. Wow! I really thought that theme was cool. Heilemann introduced some other concepts that were later adopted like widgets and a settings page for themes.

All the stuff we see and do with WordPress today started with some very humble beginnings and has grown tremendously in the last ten years. The “Strayhorn” release seems like it was a huge turning point and I feel pretty fortunate that I was able to witness a chunk of it in those early days.

Bacon Wrapped Grilled Chicken

This recipe is nothing like the ones you’ll find on those recipe websites. Very simple stuff.

  1. Wrap chicken with bacon.
  2. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on it.
  3. Fire up the grill.
  4. Toss the chicken on the grill grate.
  5. Eat.

The finer details of how to wrap the bacon on the chicken, what other spices or sauces (use your favorite barbecue sauce, you won’t regret it) to add and how long you want to grill is all up to you.

I’m back!

After a long absence of not having a blog, I’ve returned. There was a time where I was running a self-hosted blog on schulte.mn, but I found that I just didn’t write enough to continue to pay for hosting. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with WordPress nightlies and having the ability to install whatever plugin or theme I wanted. If I want to break things again, I’ll just do it on localhost and be done with it. It’s probably for the better anyway. No more worrying about having my blog not working or displaying correctly. No more will I pay for hosting and not actually use it. I won’t worry about posting. I’ll just post when I want.

My entire, small history of the old blog is long gone. I won’t miss it much. Sure there are few posts that I wouldn’t mind seeing again but I’ll just start with the clean slate and move forward.

Here we go!