tl;dr: I’ve yet again revamped my blog, and in the course of so doing managed to recover some old content and give it a home.

(I was going to publish this soon after New Years Day–hence the title–but never got around to it. But better late than never, so here it is. I couldn’t think of a better title.)

I’ve maintained a personal domain and associated website since the turn of the century. Every once in a while I get the urge to revamp it in ways large or small. This is the latest version, created using the Hugo static site generator working from source files in Markdown format. I switched to Hugo from Jekyll, used for the previous version of the site. Besides being considerably faster to generate the site and considerably simpler to install and maintain, Hugo also allowed me to re-use a different style of URLs from a previous site organization, which (fingers crossed) should allow old links to once again work.

Like an ancient city periodically rebuilt over the ruins of an older one, previous versions of this site are still visible here and there. The site has had the following forms over the years:

  • 2000: I created my first personal website, hand-coded in HTML and published at the domain name www.hecker.org. (I hosted it on a Dell server running what later became Red Hat Enterprise Linux; a coworker of mine had bought the server for his own websites, and let me host my own stuff on the server in exchange for administering it.) The “interests” page is a mostly-unmodified page from that site, and a good guide to what I was reading and listening to back then.
  • 2004: I adopted the Blosxom blogging software and did quite a bit of work to make the site as standards compliant as possible (and in the process learned a great deal about how the HTTP protocol works). You can find a number of in-depth posts about that work using the “blosxom” tag.
  • 2006: I started a separate blog Swindleeeee!!!!! on Wordpress.com to discuss the eMusic service. I later folded that blog back into my main blog; see the “emusic” tag for those posts.
  • 2008: I moved my main blog to Wordpress.com as blog.hecker.org. (I continued to host the hecker.org website on the same server as before, so that older posts remained available.)
  • 2011: I changed the blog’s name to frankhecker.com.
  • 2015: I moved off Wordpress.com and created a new blog civilityandtruth.com using the Jekyll static site generator.
  • 2019: I started a separate Substack newsletter, also named Civility and Truth.
  • 2021: I closed down the Substack newsletter and renamed my blog back to frankhecker.com, still using Jekyll to generate it.
  • 2024: I converted all Markdown posts to the format used by Hugo, corrected typos and missing images where I found them, fixed the quotation marks in posts that had been stripped of them (an unfortunate side effect of moving off Wordpress way back when), re-added comments submitted to the old Blosxom and Wordpress versions of the blog, and re-incorporated old pages that had been left behind in the various blog migrations. I also generated a web version of my book That Type of Girl.

My goal for this version of the blog is to serve as a permanent record of my writing, in a form that is relatively low maintenance and should be readable for many years to come. Except for the occasional post I no longer write directly for the site; almost all my current writing is done on the Cohost site, where people can comment on it and share it with others. As time goes on I’ll bring some Cohost posts over here (after slight revisions); if Cohost threatens to go under (a real possibility) I’ll accelerate that process.