About Spacerock.com

What is this site, anyway?

Well, where do I begin? It was 1996, and I was learning, literally learning HTML. So, everything was static pages. I posted 'pictures of my life' as indicated by the 1998 screenshot below from web archive.

Despite the broken image as all of the web archives don't fully capture, you get the idea. Back when black backgrounds were "cool" as were textured, embossed backgrounds. Such things make me run screaming now...remember the dilema when people actually printed off web pages - print a black page with white text and guess what? Nice blank pages from that printer...

It came along, and started morphing into a graphics set I had for about 15 years. The realization that I had that graphics feel for that long sort of scared me, and I realized how much I had neglected updating the site as my career rose and I was doing amazing things in the private sector.

I liked the graphics set I had - obvious by the fact that I used it for a decade and a half. I had made subtle changes as I went along, every so often revamping the site. In the background/under the hood, I had developed a pretty robust content management system - originally written in perl - to manage the site. I was able to easily add content. I also managed other websites and had scripts written I am still proud of to this day.

I had wanted to change it over to WordPress after learning that PHP had changed so much that I didn't want to have to go through a learning curve to fix it. I knew my website would die a painful death as the PHP language was changing and key features were being depricated. But then a fire was lit under me in the summer of 2021, and I got myself up to date with PHP, rewrote lots of queries, and the re-design started.

The redesign continues and I got up this morning to see that FireFox is no longer hosting remote content - my Facebook Feed was no more - but I wanted to ditch that anyway. It is never a good practice to rely on an outside partys' content for use in one's own website. I preach this where I work and need to practice it here. I still have my weather feed and like having it, but it'll be leaving.

I made this site so I can now manage it from my phone. As of this writing, all is not great on mobile devices yet, but it's on my list. I have a growing file on my reMarkable tablet that is 30 some pages long now with all of my notes, bugs, desired feature upgrades, etc.

If you've read this far, thank you. This site is older than some of the people I work with at the County of Santa Clara! I hope to manage this site until my last breath is near. 2021 has been an interesting year for me and I look forward to the coming years and updating this fun site.

Namaste!