Looking back on many versions of a website no one reads
As I sort through this pile of various versions of old Thunt.net’s…. Website templates, database versions, broken old piles of SQL with blog posts locked inside, I wonder if it was all worth it. Was it worth so much of my time to make a webpage that no one reads and that (in hindsight) I should have just put on blogger in the first place and then I wouldn’t have had to move or redesign or mess with SQL and databases, eventually making things so complicated that the data became lost (and I am currently searching for it).
But then I remember that I did teach myself HTML, PHP & SQL (with a little help from my friends) and that I ended up using these skills to maniuplate data for my job solving technical problems for corporate lawyers. So I guess that even though very people read my website, and probably less were interested in all the changes I made to the template and all the different versions of databases I wrote and the various times the site moved from server to server and format to format, I guess it was all worth it, because in the end I learned what they wouldn’t teach me in school.
Thrown from the Computer Science program by courses desgined to run fast and hard to burn students out of the program, I lazed around in History, Humanities and English, scoring high marks and learning the history of the world, but always drawn back into computers by my website and my desire to be a part of the internet culture (when studing History I read Vonnegut, when studying English I read PHP programming, when studying Computer Programming I read History).
Though I never made it (I’m not kottke, or boingboing or really a blog that anyone reads (except maybe Rex), I am still a blog and still a blogger and kindof a programmer as well as being a Historian and a writer. I am many things, but not employed. Ah well, back to sorting a seemingly never ending pile of old files that I have accumlated through the years. So many different versions of websites never read.
Even looking at this version of Thunt.net I can tell something is wrong with the text, and though I’ve been on Tumblr for a few years, I still want to migrate to Blogger, so I can complete my selling out to the great and powerful google and achieve total data unification. I’d also like to work for google or facebook. I’ve been thinking about facebook from the “how to destroy facebook” persepective for many years, but now I’ve turned a corner and am interested in “how to improve facebook”, from the same perspective I used to fear google because of the obvious overwhelming privacy concerns, but now I see it the other way and imagine what an incredible tool they could build for humanity if they go all the way and truly connect everything together. I wish I could be a part of that.
