If you're reading this, then my new blog posting code is unstoppable and the Vivtek website is well on its way to being the informational colossus it was always fated to be. I'm writing this introductory post in late January of 2026, but my intent is for it to migrate gradually backward as I retroactively write a bit on recent work that still feels current enough for me to pretend to have been blogging it on the fly. I expect it to end up roughly in last October, as it should remain the first post of the modern era.

This is actually about the fourth or fifth website publication code I've written, and you can still find examples of all of these eras on the site, because I never throw anything away. Many of these pages, broken and with weeds growing through their antiquated HTML and template fields, are essentially old washing machines on the back porch with a motor that probably still works. I'll go into a little history below the fold. (In case you're new to the ancient art of blogging, "below the fold" is an ancient blogging term taken from newspaper publishing that makes a distinction between the above-the-fold text that appears in the feed and this below-the fold text that appears on a longer-form page. If you already knew that, remember to be diligent about your back exercises. They're important.)

In my first web publication era, back in the 90's, I just typed basic HTML into vi, right on the metal. I was running on AOLserver at the time, and so I built a lot of dynamic code in Tcl that got called on every page retrieval to generate output on the fly. I did some really neat work back then, which is all completely non-functional today. It served my needs for years, but sometime after the turn of the century (I didn't take good notes back then, so I don't know exactly when) I wrote a Wiki-like system in Perl and Tcl that allowed me to slam text into a textbox on the server and publish it on the spot. I extended that system in 2006 to include blog posts organized by date and keyword, because blogging had become a Thing and I had grown tired of having my entire thought-of-the-moment output scattered on forums here and there. (See, I know I did that in 2006 because I blogged about it. The system works slowly, but eventually comes round right.)

That system served me well for another few years, but then I discovered Blogspot and started doing project blogs over there (the house renovation in Richmond IN, semantic programming [which devolved into link-of-the-day stuff], particularly interesting terminology I'd encountered during translation work, politics and other complex systems, and so on, each on its own separate blog). And then about 2013 I also started Facebooking in earnest, which bled off a lot of my text-generation energy.

In 2014, I rediscovered the urge to do some coding and more in-depth article publication and realized I had no idea how my old system would work in 2014; I'm pretty sure that I'd already moved the static site to Github hosting by then and so publication would have to run on my local machine. So I rewrote it from scratch. I only used it for just that one year, though. 2015 was blisteringly busy in terms of both international travel and translation work—I earned enough in 2015 to pay off our debt and buy the farm we now live on. It was essentially the only really lucrative year I ever had. And then in 2016 we moved back here to Puerto Rico and I started writing a lot of notes, fully intending to turn at least some of them into publications. Eventually. The notes system grew in complexity, and eventually I'll write something about that, too.

Then, a few months after we spent our savings on a farm, Hurricane Maria blew the roofs off and I became a roof builder for a year. And then the earthquake wedding happened. And Covid. During the original Covid lock-down, besides digging our long-neglected but still not quite dead coffee field out from its embedding jungle, I also rewrote some of my page publication code again to work straight from notes. That was part of my world-domination infrastructure megaproject. Eventually I'll write something about that, too, but I didn't in 2020, or thereafter.

In late 2023, I found myself doing what I now call my "shadow doctorate", the readings and research I would have done in 1997 or so in artificial intelligence, pursuing an approach that today would generally be lumped under "GOFAI", or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence. I find this categorization somewhat inaccurate, but what isn't inaccurate is the fact that what I wanted to do then still hasn't been done, because as you know, Bob, the field lurched sharply in a very different direction. Against all expectations, I appear to be doing now what I had planned in rough outline in 1997. And that, my friends, I really do need to write about.

So here we are. I rewrote some of my publication code last year, again again, when I realized I wanted to publish some pages on Jumbo and the parallel terraced scan. And now I'm building blog posting from scratch (again) even before I finalize those pages about the actual research, because I feel the need to commit more long-term writing, and this is how I'll do it.

I am actually aware that normal people consider the goal of tool-writing to be to write a tool fewer times than it's actually used, but this mindset has always been a challenge for me. I always end up seeing page (and blog) publication as yet another form of semantics that really needs to ramp up to full sentience for me to do it justice.

Like everything.

And yes, I really will be writing something about that, because that's the entire point of this exercise.

So this is me, extending a welcome to you, Gentle Reader, to what I am thinking of as the modern era of blogging and reporting here at my antediluvian website, as an accompaniment to my shadow doctorate. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I intend to enjoy writing it.