The dust was thick.  The smell was musty.  And there were cobwebs in every corner.  Today I grabbed a rag and some Pledge and made my blog all nice and shiny once again.  I’ve also pulled some static pages from my old site into my blog template, which will allow me to keep them updated a bit easier than before.  You’ll also notice a new masthead picture – that’s Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, taken this past weekend.

In October, 1998 I started a freelance technical support web site at work. I was running a web server on a spare PC, serving up pages of documents and links that I used in my day-to-day job. It started as nothing more than a few pages of things I used all the time. Within a couple of years, the site exploded into one of the most popular intranet web sites and was being used by technical support engineers, sales teams, and engineering teams worldwide.

At its peak, my server was delivering over 2.5GB of data and handling over 40,000 requests per day (not much by most standards, but quite a lot for a self-run intranet site). Over the years, the site grew to include two regional sub-sites, discussion forums, mailing lists, automatic troubleshooting tools, and more. I started with static HTML pages and ended with a PHP/mySQL-driven portal. In order to keep my artistic license with the site, I maintained it outside of work and in my spare time. This caused periodic grief as snobby execs attempted to shut the site down, but it allowed me to post what I wanted and in a manner that would allow me and my team to do our jobs more effectively.

A few moments ago, I shut down what many employees affectionately knew as Worcester (I named the server after where I went to school). All of the content and interactive scripts had been migrated to other servers over the last 6 months, and today was the day I set out to remove the re-direct and informational page. I was the sole maintainer of the site since its inception 29 quarters ago. After I moved out of my role as a senior technical support engineer in July 2004, I started the process for shutting down the server. I no longer had the time (or motivation) to maintain the site in my free time. Besides, it wasn’t of any benefit to me anymore.

So now I move on to the next big thing…

I’ll make an exception. I usually hate posting those annoying “What video game character are you?” types of quizzes to my blog, but I stumbled upon this one today and thought what the heck… It simply tells you what your birthday means. Simple and affordable. Oh, by the way… feel free to send me some presents in a few weeks.

Everybody’s doing it. Why aren’t you?

These days it seems like everyone and their pets have blogs. It’s amazing what random crap people will write about, and I’m no exception!