What’s this site all about? Who are you?

Well first off, my name is Brent and I’m a product of the 80s. Growing up as the internet was finally becoming available at a consumer level I was always facinated with its potential. By the time I had graduated college I was spending an increasing amount of time writing and creating scripts and websites on it that I realized I needed a place of my own to call home. So brentter.com was born. At the time I was running a crowd-sourced photography site that was starting to see some real traffic so this was actually the second domain that I’d ever purchase. My day job was in advertising so it made sense for me to write about the industry. And I wrote A LOT. This website would become one of the top 20 ranked advertising blogs at the time but I was running myself thin. I started despising having to sit down to knock out a blog post or two in addition to everything that was going on when a few years prior I had loved it. It’d become more than a hobby and I already had a 2nd and 3rd job with my own side projects and client gigs. So I just turned off commenting site-wide and logged off.

6 months of no posts and I eventually gave it one last entry. It was about what I had just finished doing for a client. I had been writing up a bunch of SQL queries to bulk-edit a few thousand of his WordPress pages so that he wouldn’t have to go through and edit them one by one. Then about a year or so later I decided to just take it offline. The DB was actually still there, just I’d removed all the static files and replaced the homepage with some ASCII. This site was running WordPress and at that time the platform was just a security nightmare, especially if you weren’t actively monitoring it. I mean, it still is a security nightmare. If you’ve been keeping up with what’s been going on between the co-creator of Wordpress and WP Engine you’d also think the entire future of the platform seems like a nightmare too.

So You’re Going To Start Posting Advertising Commercials Again?

Well, maybe a few, but just some of my old favorites. With all the toxicity that now seems to be everywhere online I think we should all try to remember what it was like in the early days. Back when you were guaranteed at least a dozen AOL cds in the mail each week and AltaVista was the largest search engine. You’d go around and find sites that were there to share content with other people without looking for a marketing angle. You’d find their favorite blogrolls and web-rings, collections of stories or cool animated gifs - just sharing for the sake of sharing. I like that idea so I’m going to follow it.

How’s Hugo?

So far I’ve been enjoying working with Hugo. They really weren’t kidding when they talk about just how fast it is. The only downsides have been in the template system and how janky it can be at times and that every big update to Hugo means something important in the blog is going to break. It’s a work in progress.

Cheers,

~Brent

(Here’s a few spots where I can be found elsewhere on the web):