Dave Kellam

I’ve been meaning to post this for a week or two now, but have been putting it off in favour of working on a redesign of the site. I registered the domain eightface.com eight years ago on August 16th, 2000, just before heading off to university. I wanted to move the site away from a subdirectory on my local ISP, get some real hosting, and a much cooler domain name. I had a lot of trouble coming up with a cool name and ended up just throwing two random words together. In typographical hindsight, eightface is a bitch of a word to work with, and I probably could have made my design work easier without a descender or the kerning issues when it’s in all-caps.

Eight years is a relatively long time — a drop in the hat for some, but it’s almost a third of my lifetime. As always, much has changed and much has remained the same. When I started the site, the “leader of the free world” was an impeached philanderer and not a cheerleader from Yale, you could bring water onto planes and Britney Spears was still somewhat innocent.

I have been with one webhost the entire time. I signed up for the basic Dreamhost plan, received 30mb of storage, very little bandwidth and almost nothing in terms of dynamic scripting. Now I have 733gb of storage, terabytes of bandwidth, and access to all sorts of dynamic programming. The price has remained the same and for the most part, the hosting has been been reliable.

This site has always been a weblog, although their scope of weblogs has shifted over the years. I started off using Blogger, when posts had no titles, no comments and were basically what we now seem to be calling tumblelogs. Having achieved a similar effect with a scribble.nu journal in a frame, I was drawn to the fact that I could publish to my own site from anywhere without needing an FTP client. From there, I moved to Moveable Type when Dreamhost let us have a database and perl access. I switched over to WordPress, because Six Apart began to charge for MT. I’ve considered moving on from WordPress (particularly for Habari, Django or EE), but the eight years of legacy leaves a lot to contend with. I could throw it all out the window, or move it to an archival subdomain, but the inept high-school and college-age ramblings are a part of me.

After a few months (or years) of pseudo-inactivity on the weblog, it needs a jump start. I started taking myself too seriously a few years ago, it hampered my ability to post and have fun with the site. Basically, I need to make this space personal again.