About 25 years ago I built my first website. Back then I had just gotten “high speed” internet and I was building web servers at home and I was learning Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I hosted websites from a spare computer in my house, broke things constantly, reinstalled operating systems more times than I can count, and somehow loved every minute of it. I would stay up so late at night tinkering and learning. I spent SO much time doing it that my wife suggested I should probably get a job in some kind of Tech related field.
She was right, and I did. Over the years there have been so many different versions of vonralls.com. So many different topics. Linux, Coding, Politics, Pop Culture, General Technology, Fitness, Personal Development. So many different PHP based CMS (Content Management Systems) were released over the years. I tried so many of them. Remember PHPBB? Joomla? I can’t even remember some of them now. Obviously WordPress won out, or at least did a lot better than many of the others.
The only regret I have is that I didn’t keep all that content somehow over the years.
Which brings me to the question at hand. Why am I building this? Even though I’m getting older I still do a lot of really fun stuff, and I miss writing about things. I may not be a great writer, but I do enjoy it. I regret not being able to look back on all that content I wrote over the years and reflecting on it. So here I am.
There is a twist, however. Over the last couple of years the companies that I’ve worked for have been encouraging the use of AI. I’ve been fortunate to be able to use ChatGPT, and most recently, Claude in my daily work. I’ve become super fascinated with it. I’m still not an expert by any means, but I keep thinking how awesome it would have been had I had this stuff 25 years ago. I remember spending hours and hours and hours trying to get a wireless network card to work on Gentoo linux. You just don’t have to do those kinds of things anymore.
So as I continue my journey into working with AI tools, and simultaneously miss having a website and writing content I decided to ask ChatGPT to help me build a new WordPress site. So here we are. The content will just be from me. It will be about everything. It could be some race report from a Marathon or it could be some stupid thing I want to vent about regarding Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Who knows? I hope you enjoy the content and I look forward to sharing my experiences with you.