The last iteration of this blog, chucklinart.com, was hosted on a CockBox VPS where SSH keys were needed. It ran on a homegrown Python-based blogging framework that I coded up myself. The code is still there if you want to check it out or maybe even build on it. I called it “MmEEBlog” (Multimedia for Everyone, Everywhere), and I really think it had a lot of potential. The idea was to cut out all the middlemen — YouTube, Soundcloud, Insta — whatever and allow anyone to just host their own stuff.
It worked well, and I’m especially proud of some of the object-oriented features I did with regard to relating various objects; you could easily embed a video or audio file in a blog post by selecting it from a drop-down, for example. It was pretty cool until I got a new laptop, wiped the old one, and realized that I had lost my SSH key.
The site eventually succumbed to bit-rot. Oh well. There was a lot of good stuff there.
This is, believe it or not, the first version of chucklinart.com that runs on WordPress. I worked with WordPress a lot in the corporate world back in the day. It was a lot different. We were coding custom plugins and themes for some of the biggest global media brands (Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated, etc.) until the company — a great old American powerhouse — got bought out by the Koch brothers and sold for parts.
So I’m not unfamiliar with WordPress… or so I thought. It has changed a lot. It’s a lot of pointing and clicking now, not so much coding.
It took me a bit to figure it out. I can still access the code, but it seems totally unnecessary. After spending decades figuring out basic shit like “How do I upload a picture and make it available only to people with only a specific user role?” back in the late ’90s to the OO potential masterpiece that was MmEEBlog of five years ago, all I really want to do now is enjoy the fruits of our nerdy late nights (fellow Gen-X code junkies from the ’90s get me here) without surrendering to corporate a-holes who just want to harvest my data.
WordPress fit the bill. So here I am. It took a few late nights to get this blog up and running. There will be other late nights, I’m sure, and probably some custom coding at some point, but overall I can recommend WordPress to anyone who wants to set up their own site and not rely on tech-bro billionaires to get their content out there.
Peace,
Chuck