Whether you think of COVID as the world’s most fraudulent international crisis, the harbinger of something much worse to come, the great equalizer, a hoax, a global conspiracy, an accident – whatever – something few would disagree with is that it had a profound impact on pretty much everyone’s lives. For myself, I lost everything. Not just friends and family members’ lives (thankfully not all of those) but my companies, every line of code I ever wrote in the 30 years I’ve been developing, my phone number - and with it access to just about my entire digital life due to 2FA security procedures I had long put in place after previously fallen victim to identity theft and Account Take Overs (ATOs) of not just one account, but nearly every account I’ve ever had (in time I plan to write more about this, how it happens and how it can be prevented) – my blogs, my websites, all the backups I had and all the backups to the backups. There’s probably a solid 100TB of extremely valuable data, tax records, financial records, source code, databases, database backups, etc out there in various clouds and cloud storage that I’ll never regain access to (most of which I already know to have been permanently deleted from lack of access and payment). Well, as I often like to say – I lack access to a time machine, but I do have (literally as of today) 39 years of life experience and about 30 of those spent writing software and creating technology; and despite many more close calls than I can remember – I’m not dead yet. Best to get on with it – Get busy living or get busy dying.
You may ask yourself why I – or any of the myriads of other people out there do the same thing – would bother a website at [my-name].com. It might seem narcissistic or shameless self-promotion but, while I can’t speak of others’ reasoning, with me that is not the motivation. For me, it is quite simple – in the software and technology industry, when you’ve been at it as long as I have and reached the levels I have, when you’re applying for jobs or contracts and any number of other scenarios – people are going to “Google” you. When they do that, I’d rather them see what I choose them to see rather than whatever the search engine decides it wants to show them. No amount of search engine optimization or 3rd party targeting to a specific search phrase will ever be able to compete with a website hosted at that [exact search phrase].com and, so, 20 years ago or so I bought benjaminstarkhanson.com to host my blog, resume, past projects, et cetera - specifically so I could maintain control over my public persona and how I show up in search results. I’ve rarely had any time to keep that updated (indeed, the site has been down for around 5 years now) but I do have a chance to do that now and so that’s what I’m doing.
As with most actions taken in my life, there is no single reason behind it but a quorum – and here is no different. I created my first website around 1995 – a gaming cheat-code website hosted on GeoCities that attracted a relatively large number of visitors given the infancy of the internet at large at the time. I was 10 years old at the time.
A couple years later, my best friend (who knew my login information), moved away and thought it’d be funny to hack that website and turn it into a porn site (changing my login at the same time). For maybe 72hrs I was a child unwillingly operating an adult porn website.
Luckily, GeoCities was quick to respond when I reached out to their support about my situation and quickly restored my website from a backup and restored my access. In the 30 or so years since then I’ve had somewhere around a hundred or so clients that became my clients because similar (or, several times, the exact same) situation happened to them (and several hundred more that just needed a new site built, whatever the reason). Usually this is disgruntled ex-employees, ex-administrators, designers that didn’t feel properly compensated or lost out on contract renewals (call them collectively revenge attacks), sometimes it was just random hackers (or bots) that discovered a weakness and exploited it to deliver spyware or any number of other scenarios.
The vast majority of these sites were self-hosted corporate marketing sites built using WordPress (while waning, the vast majority of these types of sites are still built on WordPress today). Now, I – like most experienced software developers – don’t particularly like making websites. They are by far the least complex software problem I have ever had to solve. I think the only one I was ever actually excited to build was that first one almost 3 decades ago. That being said, websites are still a huge – and still growing – market and I have more experience than anyone I’ve met successfully delivering secure, beautiful sites with all the telemetry, plumbing and backend integrations that really empowers marketing and advertising teams to be extremely effective in executing upon their goals.
With the relaunch of my personal website, I have a “free” opportunity to explore new, more modern, approaches to Content Management Systems (CMSs) and marketing websites outside of the WordPress ecosystem so that I can be better informed about potential solutions I can offer my clients. This is not to say that I will not work on WordPress sites, or that they can’t be secured – not a single site that I’ve ever built or secured whether built on WordPress or any other platform (save that very first GeoCities site mentioned) has ever been compromised after I got involved. If you should require my services for development, security, hosting or whatever else on any platform or technology stack – I can and will help, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Still, I’m going to take this opportunity available to me to experiment with potentially better ways – and document the entire process as I go.
For this site, I’ve chosen to use Next.js for the front end, Vercel for hosting and continuous deployment, GitHub for source control and Prismic for a headless CMS. There were many other contenders and I have about a half dozen other domains I need sites for that I’ll be trying these other options out on and documenting the experience.
Please stay tuned and check back periodically to see how this all goes and learn from my experience.