The first post on the original SysMango.com was on March 1st, 2003.
Sam had asked that the first post be on March 1st. I didn’t see a reason why not (#DaddyDuty).
The original site was developed using Movable Type. When the licensing for Movable Type changed, I moved over to Drupal. I had looked at a lot of of the available software for hosting a personal site. The primary limiting factor at that time was what could I use with the hosting options I was paying for in 2003.
While I preferred PostgreSQL as a database, most of the hosting optoins only offered MySQL. The database was a secondary concern. I have run and supported different databases at home and at work.
All of the platforms I have hosted the site with have worked, and all of them have had platforms.
I used to care a lot more about how the site looked. Most of the problems was in finding a site that I could made look like I wanted it to look. I didn’t really have database problems. Most of the software issues were just during software updates. I had run Drupal from versions 3 to 8. The move to Drupal 8 made me realize that I was spending more time managing Drupal than I was creating content for the site. I really liked Drupal. But the point of the site was to get posts out of my head, not really managing the software.
Sometime in 2016, I decided it was time to stop fighting with the software and move to a static site generator.
The decision to go static created opportunities to change to hosting that would work more the way I wanted to work. Posts are in Markdown. The while site is really nothing more than a git repository. I did end up losing the ability to do comments and trackbacks, but by 2016 almost all the comments and trackbacks were spam. And most of the real content was on the big social media sites.
At this point the domain is mostly just about email. I do want to start using it for more, but it will always just be a personal blog. At least for as long as I own it.