Well after nearly 23 years of largely uninterrupted and admirable service, the time has come to officially retire the custom Content Management System that has powered it all: Presentation Engine. I originally created and deployed the first version of PEngine back in late 2001 when I first created this blog before I registered the domain name in October of 2001. Back then it was nothing more than a shoddily put together classic ASP application with an Access DB driving it that I threw together in a hurry. Until today, some variation upon that original codebase has been delivering content to my readers despite the fact it has advanced significantly over the years.

But back in April I laid out the reasons for putting Presentation Engine to rest. For those of you who didn’t read that post, here is the gist of it:

In addition, I have decided to sunset the custom application driving this website, the Presentation Engine. I have worked on this application longer than any other project over the course of my life and I won’t lie: A huge part of me is going to miss it. But the reality is that my opinions on CMS related apps have changed rather drastically over the years. Which is to say that I’m not really a fan of them any longer. Though they can be convenient, the reality is that they create far more problems than most of us are willing to admit.

As the time you are reading this, that transition has been completed. This post is only being uploaded as part of the new Hugo powered version of this website and marks the end of an era. While I will miss PEngine as I stated above, I’m also glad that it’s done as its deprecation marks a major step forward in terms of redefining the relationship between my life and my profession. To put this more simply, PEngine has largely existed as a way to showcase my web development skills to potential employers and at this point in my life, I neither need nor want that anymore. And no I won’t be going into more detail on that at this time. What I will say that as I’m getting older, I’m realizing that my time as an individual contributor in tech and perhaps my time in tech in general is growing shorter.

There were some causalities in this transition. For starters a ton of legacy file downloads I was hosting have been taken down. There are many reasons for this, but mostly because a ton of them weren’t being used and some of them had copyright related issues associated with them, hence their departure from the new website. If you are trying to download something that was previously hosted here and isn’t anymore, feel free to email me and request that I reupload it. I will afford these requests a due amount of consideration.

Secondly the project section of this website is currently gone. Mostly because the only currently available project page was for Presentation Engine and that is no longer a viable entity. However one thing I would like to preserve from that page is the list of downloads for legacy PEngine versions. Whereas all of the 5.x releases and activity can be found on Github and will continue to live there (though the repository has been archived and will no longer be maintained), I want to keep the older versions around just in case I want to go on a nostalgia trip someday:

Sadly I didn’t keep an archive of the actual 1.0 version of the website that was running when I made my first real “surviving” post back in August of 2001 about Windows XP hitting RTM status. Man, things sure were different back then. I was un-ironically still using Windows and actually excited about it! To be clear, this wasn’t the first actual post I made, but its the oldest one that made the cut for the new website. Some older material has been purged in an effort to up the general level of respectability associated with my official online presence.

The reality is that I used to spend way too much of my time engaging in online pissing matches and the posts on the old blog were very reflective of that. All of that content has now been removed along with any and all supporting materials associated with them. To those of you negatively impacted by these posts over the years, please accept my most sincere apologies. I consider all of these hatchets to now be buried. If you disagree, please feel free to reach out as I’m willing to discuss this further.

Let’s face it: I’m getting older and I’m changing and this website is changing right along with me. To anybody and everybody who has come along for the ride, thank you for your time and attention. It has meant the world to me. As it stands now if you are still coming here for the tech rants and not the personal life updates, I can recommend a few alternative blogs like Ludicity, IT Fossil or Pluralistic as they are in the business of producing primo-tech rants.

To those of you interested in keeping up with me personally, this is the place to be. This website is about my life and my family and provides an anchor for the public version of my online presence and it will continue to serve that purpose for the forseeable future.

P.S. If you are looking for rock solid hosting with the best tech support available, I will never hesitate to recommend Linode. For the last seven years the Debian VM for this website was hosted there and I never once had a problem that I didn’t create on my own, their support team was always helpful and quick to respond.