Andy Chase

It’s April 7, 2007 and once again I’m migrating my web site to a new platform, and a new domain at NiceOld.com.

The shift in platforms should come as no surprise; since I began maintaining a more or less active web presence in September 2001, I’ve hopped from a homegrown blogging tool to PhpWiki to another home-grown blogging tool to MovableType to TextPattern to WordPress, and now to Drupal.

My basic reason for switching each time has been that something better has come along… “better” is a subjective term, so for the sake of avoiding religious wars about content management tools, let’s amend that to “better for me.” I think the earliest version of MovableType was out when I started keeping a weblog in late 2001, but I didn’t know about it - even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have used it. At the time I was all about reinventing the wheel, which I think was a good thing for the relatively inexperienced programmer that I was; I learned a lot about content management by hacking on that first primitive, one-user tool, even if I never really finished or released it as free software as was my original lofty goal.

By the time I got some exposure to MovableType 2.x and decided to switch, I had gotten the “If I don’t build it myself, I’m less of a coder” chip off my shoulder, and I wanted something that “just worked.” The fact that it was written in Perl was actually a plus at the time, as my unfamiliarity with Perl enforced my vow not to poke around under the hood.

Subsequent jumps to TextPattern and then WordPress were both inspired by the desire for a somewhat more sophisticated tool that would accommodate journal-style weblogging along with static pages, and perhaps the occasional photo or two… a content management system, in other words. I’ve been up to my elbows in one full-blown CMS or another since spring of 2004, but until fairly recently I was convinced that a CMS would be overkill for a one-man operation like mine, at least with the tools available. I had written Drupal off until the last couple of months because I tried out a very early version of it some years ago (possibly even pre-1.0,) and found it unusable and/or inscrutable at that time.

So what changed? My approach to “putting stuff online,” for one thing. I’ve wrestled quite a bit with the best way to organize, categorize, and present the various things I write, photos I take, and audio I record. I’ve also wrestled with the notion of personal online presence versus professional online presence; what’s appropriate, do I keep putting up a portfolio and yanking it down depending on whether I’m job hunting, et cetera.

I still don’t feel like I have all the answers, but the exposure I’ve gotten to Drupal over the last couple of months at work makes me feel like it may be the tool to help me find at least some of them. More than any other open-source CMS I’ve encountered so far, Drupal feels like the most carefully-architected one; built from the ground up with a consistent, extensible framework as opposed to a spaghetti code framework crudely bolted onto a halfway decent blogging tool.

As for the domain, I was domain prospecting this morning, looking for domains that were either

1. somehow related to my name or interest(s)
2. Short .com domains OR clever fractured spellings like del.icio.us or burri.to.

Thinking about my penchant for “old things”, I tried “goodold.com.” It’s the sort of name that conjures up lots of nostalgic imagery; good old days, good old-timey music, et cetera. Of course, lumped in with all of that you get “good old boys,” but it was worth looking into anyway.

As I expected, goodold.com was already taken, but astonishingly niceold.com was available. In many ways it’s a better fit for my sensibilites anyway. I really like nice old things… architecture, tools, instruments, traditions, music… and I like the way that this domain’s meaning will change for over the years; right now in 2007, the notion of a “nice old .com” is peculiar; the internet and the web have been around for a while, sure, but nobody thinks of “old sites” the same way they do about “old cars” or “old jewelry”.

It’s a much more evocative domain than ‘greyledge.net’, which has meaning to my family but no-one else, or ‘achase.net’, which smacks of, “andychase.com, achase.com, and of course chase.com were already taken, but this is better than nothing”. It’s short, easy to spell, and it’s a .com - no small feat in 2007!