Everything always needs moar fwagglechop!
So about a decade late to the party, I’ve decided to give this Blogger thing a shot.
Why? It’s a pretty long and uninteresting story, full of self-reflection, and I think well suited for a first post. Initially, I loathed Wordpress. Like all “good” PHP kids, I rolled my own CMSes, eventually winding up with some C-powered monstrosity built using qDecoder libraries abstracted by my own filthy API to make things easier on myself. I won’t lie to you, it hauled ass. The XML-based parser I built out allowed me to easily and stylishly render HTML pages, text files (as though someone had hand-formatted everything like a good “zine” editor) and even PDF files. The pages came back in fractions of a second and life was grand, particularly because extra care was taken when speaking to PostgreSQL - I simply scoffed at all the people getting owned running Wordpress, MovableType, etc.
Fast forward a few years and well… Wordpress and MT actually started rolling into reasonable products, but I stuck to my guns and kept doing my own thing. Eventually, the upkeep became too much and my sites floundered. I started playing with Wordpress, and I actually liked where the project was heading. It hadn’t had too many security issues as of late either (a few small ones, nothing major). I switched Hungry Hacker over to WP, and slowly began putting back articles (an arduous process I am still nowhere near finished with).
Sometime around this period, we started picking up the odd web hosting client purely by word of mouth, and a little while later Sabrienix was born. We picked up a good few web hosting clients - we weren’t getting rich, but the company was ramen profitable and we spent some money building out more powerful machines. We went from a humble Pentium4 powered machine at Burstnet to a couple of nice Core2Quad based machines at a couple different DCs.
We were pretty decent at it too - Hungry Hacker is powered by Wordpress on Apache, with Nginx as a proxy in front of it with some custom voodoo to cache things and keep the load on the server low. It can take a whipping, it spits out pages quite fast and overall I’m pretty proud of it.
Fast forward a few more months and because of video gaming, I dabbled in VOIP - first hosting a pirate Ventrilo server, then TeamSpeak, and finally a friend turned me onto a very young project called Mumble. Comparatively, Mumble was terrible back then (I think around 1.1.5 or so?) - but even back then it sounded phenomenal. Even despite the fact that I was the guy that hosted the servers and they’d do what I told ’em to, our friends all loved it.
I realized at some point not too long after that there were absolutely no US-based commercial Mumble hosts, and only one commercial host in the entire world. We went live with our voice servers, offering TeamSpeak and Mumble, before finally dumping TeamSpeak. The reason for that was twofold: first, I didn’t use TeamSpeak, and didn’t really feel comfortable selling a service I don’t use (even with web hosting, we tried to stick to things we were good at) and second we were a tiny fish in a really big pond and that wasn’t helping.
The more I started working with Mumble (we’ve contributed patches, a few scripts as well as spent a lot of time helping users with problems) the less I started to be interested in the web stuff. My personal blog just felt like work to maintain (the spammy content not helping), and frankly I’d rather spend my time working with Mumble or playing with my kid. I don’t give out my blog URL anymore because I think the quality of the content is really low, something I plan to remedy over here. I’ll probably keep going with the old blog too, just because of obligations I have, and I will likely mirror content that I think is actually interesting between the two, but I only plan on posting things here that I actually feel like posting.
So anyway, Wordpress feels too much like work, and I wanted to give something else a shot. Google’s accounts are strengthened with 2-factor auth and everything, such that I don’t have to worry so much about getting owned (I’m not such a loudmouth in information security circles anymore, but the paranoia that I’ll piss someone off and they decide to take me down a peg or two still haunts me). Blogger has nice integration with Android, which will likely help me get more interesting content up instead of random idiotic thoughts that really don’t go anywhere.
Of course, I may tire of this little side project and end up letting it go stagnant too. Time will tell.
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