My relationship with WordPress runs deep.

The end of April marked 3 years of using WordPress to power my personal web presence.

Before this website and the domain we’re using today, I went through a few different phases with various blogging platforms, domains, and names for my blogs. I first started blogging with Blogger.com in 2002, this was back when Pyra Labs was still running the show and the concept of blogging was new and kind of ridiculous. I remember when the founders of Blogger.com were guests on TechTV’s The Screen Savers and they were trying to explain the concept behind a service that allows people to write whatever they want and openly share it with the world. I knew then that blogging would add a whole new dimension to the information age, the personal diary was no longer a notebook hidden in a dresser drawer.

By editing and customizing the premade Blogger templates I dove head first into learning basic HTML and CSS skills and working with proprietary “Blogger Code” as I called it, which I now know isn’t proprietary at all. I bet you wouldn’t believe that I first got into web development with Flash 4.0 and I actually had a good grasp on the fundamentals of Flash animation and actionscript before I knew what I was doing with basic programming. After working with Blogger I made the plunge into MovableType, my first hosted platform that I had to install myself which back then wasn’t just a few clicks of the mouse like it is today. I used MovableType for a while before I basically let my blog go and eventually the domain expired. I guess I was busy with school or perhaps I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to offer on my website and why I had it in the first place.

I purchased MarkLangenfeld.com and started using WordPress 1.4 in 2005. WordPress wasn’t nearly as popular back then as it is today and most of my blogger friends and programming mentors were using Textpattern or MovableType at the time so I was pretty much on my own. WordPress and I have become good friends over the years, like most bloggers I have my own arsenal of different plugins and things that make this website work. In fact I was recently discussing with a friend of mine that one of the big problems keeping me from changing my layout around again is the amount of modifications and hacks that I have running now, it would be a huge undertaking. Even with that in mind I think that the flexibility and reliability of WordPress is totally unmatched by any other platform and I’m looking forward to using it another 3 or more years to come.