WordPress.org

Started writing online in 2002 with a simple site on Blogger. About a year later I decided I wanted to do more with my site due to my interest in photography, and I especially wanted to showcase my photos online.

I tried a number of CMS’s at the time, including b2, Drupal, Mambo, and Movable Type, but ran into issues and decided to try developing my own system instead. I spent the next year developing a homegrown CMS for photo blogging in PHP/MySQL in my free time.

Unfortunately my homegrown CMS could not keep up with the other systems being developed, and I grew envious of the new features that I was missing. Near the end of 2003 I decided to switch to Movable Type based on advice from a number of other photobloggers at the time, but my lack of Perl knowledge really held me back in developing the site.

In April 2004 I switched the site again, to WordPress this time. Thanks to WordPress being php-based, and the 1.2 release in May, I developed a number of plugins and a custom theme that finally gave me the site I had always wanted. Due to unforeseen circumstances I no longer have the original site (jbmax.us) or my first WordPress profile (jbmax), and I’ve been using my current WordPress profile (jrbeilke) since 2008 instead.