January 2026

I moved off of DigitalOcean, and brought all my web properties in-house, where I host them on a mini server. I purchased a small node on Heztner Cloud, which reverse proxies to my internal server via a virtual private network it establishes.

Moved to k3s (a lightweight kubernetes-compatible environment) and Helm for deployment. This has simplified deployment, and reduces downtime when I make changes.

January 2025

Added Remark42 for managing blog comments, after having removed Disqus some time back. I self-host Remark42, keeping all content within my own infrastructure.

August 2024

Replaced Tailwind with vanilla CSS, as CSS can do anything SASS or Tailwind can do, much more compactly, readably, and reusably.

April 2024

Moved to Docker Compose for deployment.

March 2024

Started using HTMX in my site to provide some more dynamic interactions (infinite scroll, inline searching, page transitions).

February 2024

Switched from using SQLite for blog and gallery items to using Postgres. This gave me some cool possibilities around search, as well as better performance.

I also dropped Swoole and switched over to a standard PHP-FPM based website, as I was running into compatibility issues with Swoole.

April 2022

Added my art gallery to the website. I'd been posting to Instagram prior to this, and this first iteration had a webhook that IFTTT would trigger, uploading the image directly to my website as well.

I also started using Tailwind, instead of Bootstrap, for layout.

March 2022

Added my /now pages.

January 2020

Migrated the site from Expressive to its successor, Mezzio.

August 2018

I refactored my website to use Swoole, an extension for PHP that implements an event loop similar to that provided in node.js, bringing native concurrency and coroutines to PHP.

2017

Moved the site hosting over to DigitalOcean; can't recall the exact month.

August 2015 — January 2016

I rewrote the website using Expressive, which we'd just released as a Zend Framework subproject.

September 2014

Moved my site to AWS, and switched to using Zend Server and its ZPK packages for deployment, integrating with AWS CodeDeploy. This didn't last long, and I'm pretty sure I reverted it within a few months, though I continued on AWS for several years.

November 2011

Added Disqus to my site to handle comments, and used a script to import comments from s9y to this tool.

December 2010 — September 2011

Began work on writing my site from scratch, using the nascent Zend Framework 2; this was in part to test ideas for ZF2 before we committed to specific directions. Ran through a variety of evolutions of ZF2, and used it to prototype our module system, which resulted in a "Blog" module that eventually became PhlyBlog, a static blog generator. I wrote some scripts to import my s9y blog entries, and a bunch of URL rewrites to forward old blog URLs to the new blog. It was at this time that I moved my blog and personal website to `mwop.net`.

I'm pretty sure this is when I moved my hosting to a Linode VPS as well.

January 2004

I decided to start blogging, and installed the serendipity (s9y) blog engine at weierophinney.net/matthew/. This was primarily to collect things I was learning — Linux systems administration, Perl and PHP tips, etc. It was great to have a space carved out explicitly for myself.

A friend started hosting my website for me, in exchange for helping him out with sysadmin tasks.

January 2002 — December 2003

I used a variety of different tools, ranging from PHP Nuke to a home-grown site written in Perl's CGI::Application. The emphasis was on having something we could drop photos to easily, and where I could have a "guest book" for friends and family to leave messages for us. I was also first introduced to wikis during this time, and wrote one up in Perl to capture things like recipes and programming notes.

December 2001

First registered the domain "weierophinney.net" and started developing a static HTML site. The idea was to be able to share photos with family and friends. I was self-hosting, and had a dynamic DNS tool that would point to my home server whenever my DNS changed.