Hello World, Again
Finally after years of deliberation and failed new year resolutions,
I write a blog post. About 12 years ago, I had published the last article on my old bitsofparag website. Then followed 12 years of writer's block; and work and responsibilities; and life's priorities, that forced me to shut down the old website after a couple of years. But 12 years also enriched me with lots of experiences, observations, learnings, unlearnings and opinions, that I felt the itch to share bits of me on a new bitsofparag website. So, hello again 👋
What was then
In the early Web2.0 days, content - viz. blogs, wikis, memes, image-sharing, comments, or social posts on Reddit, Twitter & Facebook - was created by the technically-savvy. And having a one-of-a-kind personal portfolio website was the coolest thing you could do on the web. I was active on Twitter and Facebook but they were new & had little to no promotional aspects to them. Although one could blog on Blogspot and share on Digg or Delicious to build one's clout on the social web, it was more cool to, say, add commenting apps/plugins or write one's own!
In 2009, I chose a web framework called Symfony, to learn about databases, MVC, ORMs and fluent apis. I published the website on a paid server from a hosting provider. That server could handle the stress of the relatively small number of internet users at the time. By the time I finished building the website (early 2010), I felt like a seasoned web-developer. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Wayback Machine had saved a copy of the old website. Check it out here
What is new
Well, social media may have changed the way people produce and share content online but having a personal website is still satisfying. I hope this time I am able to write more. And complement the writings with showcase apps and interesting projects. More bandwidth and more computing power has naturally led to video-based content, both short and long forms, getting more engagement than long blog posts. Keeping people engaged with prose is challenging but not a lost cause, especially when good information is competing every minute with misinformation.
What's new on this website is that there's no complex web framework behind the codebase; instead it is just my good ol' text editor and a styling framework.More info about it here And instead of buying a server on a shared hosting and administering the said server, I just handed it over to the cloud providers to make this website securely & reliably accessible to billions of people on the internet. Thanks for reading all this way!