It’s been a while.   

I know, seriously.  Swanktastic has gone through many levels of activity over the years, but never has there been a longer break between updates.  There was a substantial chance that this domain would never be touched again.   However, it was not meant to be.  There’s still a part of me which still wants to write/blog about whatever I choose to, without the confines of a micro-system like Twitter.  Swanktastic is still a great archive of my life, and I don’t like that there is a massive six month gap which is just missing on this site.

It’s been a rough six months in a lot of ways. Really, serious, non-trivial things coming up which deserved my full attention without the thought of /blogging/ getting into the mix.    It’s kind of been a  recovery mode, lately, but things generally appear to be looking up in life lately.  My life’s normal abnormalities still exist, but I’m beginning to become more comfortable in living with them.  Some friendships ended, some new ones began.  Some interesting career issues came into the mix, some interesting new places were visited. 

Part of the delay in the site’s revival was the fact that I wanted to get the site running on a modern database and editing system, as opposed to my hacked together homebrew code mixed along with good citizen Bradley’s Access database backend code.   It was truly le’ horreuer, but it served its purpose for a good number of years, and even was able to take on the massive traffic bursts which Swanksigns achieved over the years.       I suppose a Swanksigns redesign should be in the works as well, although its comment archives are really the gold mine there, and transferring those between databases will be a massive pain.

The new variant is based on dotnetengine, which I first used for my (now defunct) MCH project which I started at the beginning of the year.  MCH was fun to see what I was capable of on my own.  However, building traffic is /hard/, and creating daily content takes /effort/.   I pushed through and did a month of daily updates and even a few pieces of large-scale content, but it didn’t build a large enough traffic base to really convince me  that it was worth my time and efforts to continue.     However, the project gave me time to properly learn dotnetengine and all its quirks, and such, I can build on its /fairly/ solid foundation to build some more sites if I choose to.

Dudes.  Seriously.  Swanktastic’s first post was made on 9.20.00.  That is seven years, seven months, and twenty-two days between that time and now.   Seven years is a long time to run a “blog”.    Weirdly, it’s kind of become part of me – or my whole “thing”.   Folks have been asking me about the site more lately, which strikes me as odd as I didn’t think anyone actually visited the site, which kind of allowed me to be relaxed with the content which was written. 

But yeah, here you go.   I’ll do my best to keep it updated over the next chunk of my life, but you know, we’ll see how it goes.  Good to be back – somewhat.