It has been years since I first setup borked.us as a personal playground. Originally I limped along on the ml.org and dhs.org 3rd level dynamic domains, but over time they went away and became too unreliable.
Borked.us was born in 2002, and initially I hacked around trying to find my way through pages of html in vi. From this grew a hacky, but workable SSI (server side includes) templating system, in a time before PHP became all the rage. This lasted me until 2010, where I find that it’s lack of CSS, old style and difficult updating has led me to this shiny new CMS solution.
I did evaluate several CMS products. These were: Joomla, Concrete5 and WordPress. Out of them, Joomla seemed to be very powerful but also the most unstable and hardest to use. The plugin addition for Joomla was also a very manual process. Concrete5 was very sexy and works inline like using MS Publisher with blocks of content, however the features I really wanted were usually a $55 paid plugin, or didn’t exist. I will say for Concrete5 though, that it is extremely easy to use and add plugins and themes to. This left me with WordPress. The WordPress system was mainly created around a blogging platform, that then grew it’s CMS wings later on. I was familiar with it from using it in The Videogamer project, and found it easy to slip into. Furthermore, plugins practically installed themselves and the abundance of both themes and plugins were vast.
So here we are today. On the WordPress CMS/Blog platform I hope to update the site a bit more regularally, and give a little life back into a long forgotten domain presence.
Enjoy,
–ben