I dragged my feet on writing this post in the series about Lyza.com’s history because I thought I’d be describing the site’s embarrassing Dark Ages, two years when my content wasn’t hosted on my own site, followed by a couple more years of something that looked even less considered than an afterthought.
I'd had it backwards. Everything until April, 2005, was the Dark Ages.
As, this week, I reconstructed these years (2005-2009) forensically, I was startled by the riot of content I was creating — typically several blog posts per week. The method of hosting, the visual blandness, the lack of hacker élan — these aren’t material to the manfiest outcome, which was: content.
Everything I ever put on my site leading up to and during the “Celeste” years, no matter how lovingly-crafted and genuine and naïve and enthusiastic, those things are gone, dead. Dumped to a CD-ROM from which they have never re-emerged. In 2005, Lyza.com died[1]. But then it never died again.
In the spring of 2005, I published a brief blog post, presumably explaining why visitors were being shunted to a blogspot subdomain:
…I need a place to stash my thoughts while I develop my new software. Don’t be upset, it will all end well.
And it did end well. Or, it didn’t end, more precisely, because nothing on the web ever ends, if done right.
Yes, my site redirected to blogspot for two years. And, indeed, the two years following that, while back on Lyza.com soil, were bare-bones and structurally influenced by my adopted CMS of choice (WordPress, that juggernaut).
But that post of April 21, 2005[2] and every single one that I ever excreted afterwards is still alive, still served on Lyza.com at its original URL[3]. For better or cringe-ingly worse.
Lyza.com redirected to a Blogger blog for a couple of years. This capture is from February, 2006
In summer, 2006, I conceded that I wasn’t entirely content with the state of things (cobbler's children, shoes, that kind of thing):
...I’ve been spinning my Web wheels for nigh on two years now...
Even if it’s this stupid blogger blog for now, it has to be something. My vision for the perfect Web site for myself–someone who would likely demand that it serve as a personal killer app–is an ever-creeping morass. Even if all I get out there for now are murmors, those are louder than my useless silence.
In the fall of 2007, content is being served once again from Lyza.com.
Fundamentally, I’d had my priorities straight: content first, fripperies later. And, my, what fripperies they’d be.
I conjecture (but cannot actually precisely recall) that the reason for the sudden shift from assiduously self-crafted bespoke web software to apathetic blogger instance was because I took a job at Intel and my former employer was probably not so keen to continue all the custom hosting and infrastructure required, which they had been, kindly, doing for years, for free, to that point. ↩︎
These archival blog posts will render with a theme from a later incarnation of the website. We'll get there. ↩︎
Which indicates that at some point I exported all of the content from the proprietary blogger CMS and imported into my own self-hosted WordPress. I do not precisely recall doing this but it sounds like something I would have done and rings the faintest of tinkly bells. ↩︎