Same Life New Site

I have owned multiple domain names and have been experimenting with different types of sites over the years.

My original domain name SystemOverload was a forum that I modeled after another forum which is no longer online opentechsupport.net (named after the opentechsupport channel) from the original battle.net days. That started my love affair with reading and hacking code. I remember modifying the original UBB forum software with a patch which turned it into the commercial version. I moved on to ipb, vbulletin, and eventually phpbb.

Even though I tinkered over the years, I never could dedicate the amount of time needed to actually run a forum. So eventually I put wordpress on the server and tried to blog… A great idea at the time but I soon realized that I didn’t have the time nor the will to keep the site updated with content and my post cadence dwindled down to only posted about once every year or two.

Life moved on, I stopped hacking on code and my Information Technology career went into different direction with me becoming a Jack of all trades. From being a Exchange Administrator in the 2003 days, Citrix Administrator in the Metaframe days, general system administrator, Information Technology Manager and various roles before, after and between.

About 6 years ago I finally returned to code settling into a DevOps role and spending my time writing internal tools for the company I worked for. I still didn’t update my blog much if ever. Always intending/planning to rip out Wordpress and put up a custom site built on one of the many python frameworks. I have the boiler plate code I’ve developed and used over the years… it should have been an easy job.

Just one small problem, I still did not like writing.

The above has changed in the last few months. Since December 2020 I’ve had a lot happen. i started going through my second divorce, my daughter had a falling out with her mother and moved across the country to live with me and we can not forget the isolation from COVID.

You would think, being an introvert, that I would be use to isolation… However I’ve come to realize when you add in all the above to someone who works from home 100% of the time it and mix in depression, it leads to a terrible party story.

So the last three months, I’ve been trying to dig myself out of the hole (with the help of a awesome therapist and a good friend). To accomplish this one of the resources I have been relying on is keeping a daily journal.

During my research of techniques to help with writing a joural, I came across the "personal knowledge management/second brain" trend and discovered Obsidian. I have been using Obsidian to journal along with starting my own personal knowledge management database.

I am surprised by the fact that I’m actually enjoying both the process of journaling and improving my note taking/data collecting skills. I will say my writing skills still leave a lot to be desired.

Doing research with ADHD will send you down the google rabbit hole sometimes. While searching techniques for both PKM and writing journals I rediscovered static site generators. I’ve looked into them in the past, but always discounted them as I wanted to do something custom. I since reevaluated my thoughts on static site generators I realized I can write my blog posts with the same tool and keep them in the same vault as my journal and PKM. Essentially I can turn any journal entry, note, reference material into a blog post just by moving a file when done and performing a git commit.

So here we are almost 21 years from when my first domain name was registered and I’m going to give blogging a honest effort.

My next post will be an update as to what content I plan for this site. This domain name is more personal and is meant to be about my life, I have an alternate one which I plan on being more professional geared toward my career. The beauty of it is that the content live’s side by side with my journal and PKM. So if I make a note about a recipe it can turn into a blog post on this site, and if I make a note about a new tech/experiment it can turn into a blog post on my other site.