Site History

I started putting my pictures online about 5 years ago; I couldn't think of a good domain name, but "cantimaginewhy.com" was available, so...

My first site was just an HTML page with a JQuery plugin that connected to my Flickr account. That worked OK, except that it had to load from scratch every single time you opened a page, even if you were just moving between pages on the site. So not ideal. Also, no way to contact me. And since it was just a JQuery plugin that I had nothing to do with, it didn't do much to show off my awesome web development skills.

Next I set up a WordPress site, with a WP plugin that fetched images from Flickr. I definitely like the idea of only needing to upload to one service, and then having my site pull updates from there. Using WordPress meant that it could do updates on the server-side, including generating thumbnails from images. That meant you didn't have to wait nearly as long for the page to load. Also, contact forms are pretty simple on WordPress. However, it was stunningly unimpressive from a development standpoint - I've never been able to cultivate enough interest in PHP to learn WordPress customization. Also, the Flickr plugin wasn't quite synchronized with my actual Flickr account, so I ended up having to update both Flickr and the WordPress site any time I wanted to make changes - kind of defeating the purpose of the plugin.

Also, of course, WordPress sites require hosting plans, which can get expensive. One interesting thing is that every hosting company offers super low rates for the first year, then jacks up the rate for subsequent years. So, like, you'll pay $12 for the first year, and then be charged $120 on the first anniversary of that sweet deal. They get away with this because it's a pain in the ass to move your WordPress site, once it's deployed; so most people just pay. I don't. Instead, what I do is drop the plan after one year, switch to a new host with a super cheap intro plan, and rebuild the site from scratch. Not that hard, since it's really just that one Flickr plugin. But also not ideal.

My current hosting plan expires in 2 weeks, so...

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