From Hand-Coded Tags to a CMS

Meeting the Macintosh

What first got me interested in computers was learning about the Macintosh — in a book, of all places. Then, at an acquaintance's mold-making workshop, I came face to face with a real Macintosh for the first time, and honestly, I was thrilled. Looking back, that was where all of it began. Because anyone who knows me would probably be surprised: "You? Interested in *that*?"

A Feature Phone, and My First Failure at Hand-Coding

From there, I lived a fairly foolish life. I got a mobile phone (a Japanese feature phone), took an interest in this thing called a "website," and — book in one hand — typed out the tags by hand to build a site. I built it, all right… but back then the data charges were outrageously expensive. It shut down almost immediately. No romance to it whatsoever — my very first site, killed by the bill.

The PowerBook G4 Years

And then I got my hands on the Mac I'd been longing for. The funds came from pachinko winnings. An Apple PowerBook G4 Titanium. Not money I can be proud of, but that machine made me genuinely happy.

When I showed someone the "PowerBook G4" catalogue, they gave me a look that said *who on earth pictures you tapping away in front of one of these* — and teased me: "What are you even going to do with a notebook?" …Well, fair enough. You wouldn't picture it, normally.

…And from here, for a while, I took a detour into the adult side of things — curious as ever. Well, we all have those phases. We're only human.

Back to Building Websites

But something was missing. I wanted to take another run at the website-building I'd given up on, back in the feature-phone days, because of the cost.

Naturally, I didn't want to spend money up front. I started with what I could do for free. So I decided to hand-code everything, bought a single book on HTML tags, and taught myself.

There's more than one kind of HTML, of course. I started with HTML 4.01, then tried to branch out, meaning to move on to HTML5 and XHTML. …But it was wasted effort. In the end, the basics of HTML 4.01 were all I needed. Because no matter how the times changed, the fundamental HTML tags never did. I kept only as much as suited me — that's the feeling of it.

It was around this time, I think, that the internet was loudly insisting "you can't build a website without Flash and a page builder." Yet today, while page builders have barely survived, Flash has vanished without a trace. Where did it even go?

Flash, in a word, was a nuisance. I couldn't understand why I had to desperately learn some glorified image slideshow. That sort of thing — you can display it now with an ordinary extension.

Affiliates, and the Yomi-Search Incident

And it was precisely then, believing you could earn an income online, that I got into affiliate marketing.

To throw together a link directory quickly, I used a CGI script called Yomi-Search to edit my site. But — clueless as I was — I hacked away at that CGI to no end, and before I knew it, spammers had taken it over.

*You've got to be kidding me*, I thought. Not wanting to cause trouble for my users, I did what I could. But spammers were more than I could handle. And that's when it hit me: reckless customization is an absolute no.

…These days, no one would even know Yomi-Search ever existed. And no wonder — search itself has wiped link directories off the map, treating them as if they'd never been there at all. And to think it was once a staple of Japanese websites.

After that incident, I got stubborn for a while and decided I'd master at least one of them — CGI, PHP, Python, JavaScript, C. But the thing is, I felt I was too old to teach myself all that from scratch. Rather than learn these from the ground up, I ought to be doing proper web development — around here, I'd started to feel embarrassed writing "website-building" — and I began looking for another way, one that wasn't hand-coded tags.

To a CMS, and Where I Am Now

During this stretch, I aimed to level up my CSS, too. But this was also when I began to realize that looking things up and reusing them when needed was faster than memorizing them. You don't have to keep it all in your head.

That's when I learned about CMSs. I came in through MODX, moved on to WordPress, and finally drifted to Joomla. There were other CMSs, but they just didn't sit right with me.

…And that's how I got to where I am now.

Looking back, it's mostly things I tried to learn and wasted. HTML5, XHTML, Flash, all those programming languages — hardly any of it stuck. I got hijacked, and I got shut down by the bill. But the whole of that wasted effort taught me one thing: don't overreach — work at your own size.

From the day I recklessly customized my way into handing a site over to spammers, I changed how I do things. I stopped trying to carry everything myself and built on the foundation a CMS provides. I can't do anything flashy, and I never made much money. Even so, someone who started out hand-coding tags is still, to this day, keeping his sites running. It's been a road full of foolish detours — but the fact that it's still going is, I think, probably the best answer of all.