Spong.org was a blog community of my friends and family from 1999 to 2008.
History
In the late 1990s, I was inspired by sites such as slashdot.org, geeknik.net, and techbargains.com to write my own blogging system. After much research, I looked into blogging distros such as phpnuke.org, postnuke.com, and moveabletype.org. But they all had more features than what I really wanted. So I decided to write my own.
Friends and family members all received free accounts because spong.org was a project in the works.
In 2008, I turned off the blog because I didn’t want to maintain it anymore, and I ended up moving my blog elsewhere.
In 2013 I brought parts of the blog site back, but mostly for historical purposes.
The project has been built and converted through various technology stacks over the years.
Technology Stacks
- The website was initially built with Perl and HTML in 1999, when I was still in college. Eventually PHP replaced Perl. I it through my school’s free web account, but it didn’t include any database whatsoever.
- After college I got my own linux server running Red Hat Fedora, and added a mySQL database. I was officially on the LAMP stack.
- For a short bit, I converted it to Classic ASP and an Access database.
- The next conversion was to ASP.net with a MSSQL database with hosting on 1and1.com and DiscountASP.net.
- Next it was built with Ruby on Rails with a Postgres database. It was hosted on Heroku with Heroku Postgres for free, until it wasn’t. See: Heroku’s Next Chapter
- Currently the site is static pages built with Hugo with no database usage. It’s hosted with Netlify.
