Colophon

This site is powered by Astro. The A750 Sans font family was used extensively for subheadings and menus, while post titles use a custom font based on my handwriting. The background video/image at the top header was taken during a blackout in November of 2015.

Site History

v1: 2001

In my sophmore/junior year in high school, a friend of mine I sat next to during a computer class had a website on Angelfire and introduced me to the world of web development. Of course, I had to create a website of my own, and so Tom’s Wacky Web site was launched on Angelfire (/tx4/twws). I used all sorts of fun technologies like shtml, RealAudio background music, Vitalize (like Flash) site intros, and TABLES OH SO MANY TABLES.

If you were that friend in high school, and you’re reading this; I just want to say there is no words in the dictionary to describle how grateful I am to you. You helped start me on a path that allowed me to do this full time.

Also around this time, I was experimenting with URL subdomain services (like cjb.net), eventually registering my own domain name, tgorg.com.

v2: 2003-2005

I moved the site to a proper hosting space thanks to Mike B. (who lent me some space on his reseller account for free). The stack now included a custom backend/frontend powered by php, mysql, and blogger (via it’s ftp export feature).

v3: 2006-2015

My site was hacked by some random group of script kiddies (to be sure), which accelerated my desire to rebase the website on top of Drupal. Coding site infrastructure by yourself is hard, so I thought I might as well let a more battle-tested CMS handle it. I also switched hosts and domain registrars several times: Godaddy (domain), VPSlink, FatCow, and lastly A Small Orange

v4: 2015-2026

Drupal proved to be a bit too complicated for a personal blog, so I swiched to using WordPress. I also started using namecheap for my registrar and eventually used them as a hosting provider as well. As time wore on, around 2023-2024, I found that smartphones were powerful enough to run webservers, and had the crazy idea to host from an old but speedy one I had lying around. I then moved my registrar to CloudFlare, who was already helping me with the networking side of hosting from a smartphone.

v5: 2026 and the future

A lot of things changed in 25(!) years. AI has landed, and interestingly enough it knows how to code, pretty much making my job easy/non-existant. It also knows how to find vulnerabilities in all sorts of applications and servers, and php is no exception. php2shell, a scary looking exploit came out, and I quickly pulled the plug on the site (literally, I just unplugged my old phone and turned it off). I wanted to try using a static site generator (SSG) to replace the Wordpress system for awhile, so it was a good excuse to put some effort into getting that going. Interestingly, SSGs are very much like blogger was in concept, but they are definitely more capable and customizable. Currently I’m using Astro as my SSG, and I’m now hosting on github. Most of the code has not been touched by AI (yet).

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 25 years.