I think I like to think of myself as a writer. I think I like to think of myself as having something to say, something people will want to read, something that isn’t a complete waste of time for everyone involved. I think I like to think about it too much, and write about it too little. So here goes, enough thinking, more writing.

I’m going to tell you why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because on my desktop I have 2 programs running: Firefox and Visual Studio. In Firefox I have a few tabs open, one of them is the one I’m writing in right now, and the other few are various renditions of my soon to be website. The mass of uninspired code for said website is sitting over in Visual Studio, it stares at me, it makes me feel guilty for neglecting it.

I’ve had a personal site for nearly 20 years. (wow, I can’t believe I just wrote that, but yeah, it’s been that long.) For the first decade, HankLynch.com was completely hand rolled. Sometimes in straight html, sometimes asp, sometimes asp.net. I’ve had everything from flat files to SQL Server storing my posts and pictures. I’ve hosted it from my house, from a service provider, I’ve smuggled it away on employers servers from time to time too. It’s was always something I took pride in, and worked hard to make it the best.

Then something happened. Community Server came out, it was big, and open sourced, and free. I could grab other peoples code…good code, and I could hack it, change it up, and make it my own. I liked it, and I started using it. When they started to charge money for the latest versions, I found DasBlog, and Blog Engine .Net to play with for free, and the world was wonderful again, only it wasn’t. My site wasn’t really my creation any more, the creative passion belonged to someone else, and I was just riding his coat tails.

Then it got even worse, I discovered WordPress, it was hosted, it was free, and I could apply someone else’s design work in minutes. I was doomed. No need to really do any work, just publish my words. I think that was when I stopped writing, my passion for the site was gone. The effort was empty.

Tonight, I sit here again, with all the power of Azure, and the cloud, and all the latest tools, getting ready to take my site back into my own hands, to build it myself, to make it mine again, and I’m wondering what the point is?

Here’s the thing, I have lost some of my design skills over the years as I focused more on programming the guts of it, and less on the front end. I mean, we have people for that right? I don’t need to be bothered. As a result, I now suck, so I turned to Bootstrap to help me have an original site that would look all modern and fancy like. Only I’m realizing that because of Bootstrap, everything looks the same. And as I was laying out my site, getting it just the way I liked it, it started looking a lot like Medium, and what’s the point of making my own personal version of that, if it’s already here, right? I mean seriously?

And then I have Facebook and Flickr for my pictures, and YouTube for my video, like what the fuck do I need my own site for anymore? And if I’m being honest, I realize that more people will probably stumble across my posts here by accident that would ever directly come to my own personal site.

So here I sit, writing bullshit instead of writing code. Maybe if I get past the design and focus on the code I can get past this block I’m having. I love this editor by the way, I might have to make something like it for myself.