blogging – Schulte in Minnesota

schulte.mn is back again, too.

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.

As I mentioned before, I used to have the schulte.mn domain running a WordPress installation. My hosting company, TextDrive, moved me over to Joyent and then back again to a TextDrive after some sort of rebirth. I admit that I didn’t keep up with all gory details regarding my hosting. I think the second incarnation of TextDrive slipped off quietly into the night and along with it, my old posts and site. I wasn’t super invested in my old content. C’est la vie! I had to look that up. I did try to jump back into the fray with Linode a few years later, but even then, it was more than I needed for a simple blog. I’m sure their services are great — it just wasn’t a good fit for me.

Eventually, I just started to redirect schulte.mn over to Twitter. Twitter is something I actually use and it seemed like a logical move on my part.

I got back in the blogging game on May 7^th with WordPress.com and decided just the other day to reestablish schulte.mn again. WordPress.com makes it so simple to map a domain. Seriously. $13/year is all that it will cost me for the service. Very reasonable. Did I mention easy? It was!

The worst part of the whole process is waiting for the DNS propagation to complete. The changes eventually completed in less than 24 hours but it seemed like an eternity when everything else went so smoothly.

Not only can I say, I’m back, but schulte.mn is back, too.

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.

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 14^th 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.

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!