Now here’s something completely different.
The first domain name I ever bought was Dailything.com. I’d had lots of little sites on free hosting services like xoom.com but it signaled a shift for me from messing around to creating something that would be around longer. Dailything was born to be a blog and still is one today. Back then I used Radio UserLand and a theme that had a look very, very similar to the look of this site.
Flash forward 20 years and Dailything has undergone many, many revisions and changes. It’s no longer on the now defunct and often missed Radio Userland1. It spent a short bit on Movable Type2 and finally landed on WordPress3 where it’s been since WordPress 1.0.
This isn’t Dailything though. This is something COMPLETELY different. So, what IS this site then?
Let’s start by saying this is my personal site. By personal I mean there’s no theme to what’s written here other than it came from me. Dailything has always had a slight tech skew to it even though it has a lot of content about my family on it.
Dailything also had open comments where anyone could express their opinion about a post or topic. This is a one way conversation. Questions are rhetorical. There’s no comment system.
Dailything has always had a link blog quality about it. Short posts linking to items of interest to me. You can expect to find much more long form writing, notes, things I want to share or remember, and photos here.
At times things may seem completely non sequitur and even chaotic. Pages will change. Layouts will change. Even the back end will change. I often use this as my testing ground for new technologies I’m playing with. But that’s what makes it great.
1 Radio Userland was one of the premier blogging apps of the early 2000s. Radio brought together large groups of bloggers and pundits and helped push blogging into mainstream culture. Dailything and Yosemiteblog were both hosted on Radio Userland servers and later self hosted using Radio until mid-2003. You can learn more about the Radio product here: http://radio.userland.com/.
2 Daily Thing was self hosted on Movable Type up until just after Bloggercon in 2004 where I met a young Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress. Shortly after I exited Movable Type and migrated the site to WordPress. Movable Type is a PERL based application which, although claiming to have an easy setup, was not for the faint of heart. You can learn more about the rise and fall of Movable Type on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type.
3 WordPress has evolved over time but at it’s heart it’s still about ease-of-use. Although this site isn’t created using WordPress because I yearned for simpler days, it’s still a product I love and support. Strike that, I remade this site using WordPress so I can easily post to it from my phone as well as computer. WordPress also allows you to post photo galleries (see Photos pages) and videos. It’s a great platform and I highly recommend it. You can learn more about WordPress and even set up your own blog here: https://wordpress.org/