Goodbye, NFSN. Hello Github Pages
When I started this website, I was working at a company called Third Eye Media1. I borrowed some hosting space and put out the original version of this site in June 2001.
When I left for a new job, I had to find another hosting service. Enter NFSN2.
- HTML/PHP hosting? ✓
- Inexpensive? ✓
- Are free-speech advocate of the then-blossoming space known as the World Wide Web? ✓
I used PHP all the way back in 1995 when I still maintained an old UIUC math department project website3 for some old friends of mine. And I used PHP at Third Eye, too. So NFSN was a clear choice for me.
That said, I didn't need PHP for my site. Having common code that generated shared headers, footers, and other repated elements of a website was always a plus. As I moved away from pure web development in my career, I thought about replacing the site with static web pages. But most of them were written in Javascript4. Ugh. But I was saved with Publish.
With a purely static site, I decided to move this site to Github Pages. Easy to configure, fast, reliable, and inexpensive (free with some technical constraints, but importantly no ads).
So long, NFSN, and thanks for all the fish5.
1. The Third Eye Media website has gone through various iterations over the years, and the company is now called Blazer. ↩
2. NFSN is short for NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. ↩
3. I'll blog about that in a future post (when I get the archive sites up). ↩
4. With a nod to Sterling Archer:
Javascript is the Dane Cook of programming languages.↩
5. I'll be sad if you don't understand this reference. ↩