Me and my domain

I think I wrote the html for my first personal website in TextWrangler for some class I was taking at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Science, around about 2007, maybe a little earlier. It was a lot of fun to write it, trying to write it as correctly as possible, adding a ton of  type html comments to help me navigate the text, and I took a lot of pride in crafting the html by hand. In fact the old site still looks exactly as I intended in modern browsers. I had written it originally as “Matt Mendick’s Personal Website” which I could publish at www.pitt.edu/~mtm18 in our ~50 megabytes of storage they gave us as part of being a student at Pitt.

Later I decided to publish the same thing to mattmendick.com. But for some reason I hesitated in registering the domain, and in the week or so until I got around to actually clicking the button, much to my dismay, someone else named Matt Mendick had just registered it. So I was stuck with matt-mendick.com until the other Matt Mendick let the registration of the non-hyphenated version expire and I snagged it for myself.

Very important updates through the years #

I’ve updated a very few important things since I started the site:

The copyright date at the bottom received infrequent updates. This was almost always out of date, and because there was no unified footer code, was often only updated on the root page, while the other pages still showed the old date.
The “about me” page got its first and only update when I got a job at giftcards.com in 2008. I’m just noticing now that on that page there was a section dedicated to showing my location real-time on a map. I asked my readers nicely not to stalk me, and urged them to “don’t be creepy”. What was I thinking? Thankfully this likely broke very shortly after I added it to the page. It’s been sitting there broken for more than 10 years.
The content of the resume page was updated to include my employment at giftcards.com. However I’ve worked at 2 other companies since then, with several different roles, so that’s not been super useful. This extremely out of date resume was still offered in both “Adobe PDF Format”, and “MS Word Format” because who knows what software recruiters had access to.

I never thought to update the contact page, but thankfully my email address hasn’t changed since I signed up for a Gmail account sometime in the early 2000s. In 2007 I was apparently worried about automated robots finding my email address, so in an attempt to avoid spam, I included it on the page as “matt (dot) mendick (at) gmail (dot) com”, as if this would be the key to avoiding spam. I nullified any possibility of this working since I linked that text to mailto:[email protected].

What now? #

Since almost everything on this website is a) out of date, b) doesn’t allow me to post any new information very easily without writing html, and c) isn’t responsive, I think it’s time for an update.

It’s a statically generated site powered by Hugo with the Congo theme, hosted using Cloudflare Pages, however since it’s static, I’ll still have to publish an update every so often to get that darned copyright year to update in the footer, unless I want to use something fancy like javascript.

Preserving the past #

Since it’s hard for me to delete anything, the original site is still hosted at old.mattmendick.com in case anyone is interested to see the relic of the past.

What will you find here? #

I’m imagining an infrequent post from time to time on a topic that I felt like writing a bit about and publishing. I wouldn’t expect it to happen often, or for it to be very interesting to most people.