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About This Site

Why the GerenM web site?

Over the years, the purpose of the GerenM web site has changed dramatically. Early on, it was true blog, where I expressed my thoughts and feelings on just about everything. There was an extensive series of posts during the 2001 “9/11” attack, and the rather eerily quiet “no-fly” period that followed. Blogging was “in,” and there was a rich community, with dozens and dozens of personal blogs in the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia area. Some of us became friends, and would regularly get together IRL, as the hip kids say today.

As time wore on and blogging began to fall away, GerenM took on new life, showcasing my photographic and musical endeavors, and retreating from more personal or political postings. In recent years, there’s been a fair emphasis on tech, as well.

Going forward, the intent is to continue to focus on photography (no pun intended), music, and other creative pursuits. The What’s In My Head vlog will continue as well, with complimentary content.

Site Platform

This iteration of the site is built in WordPress, and hosted at ICDSoft. I’ve been using WordPress as long as there’s been WordPress, and hosting sites with ICDSoft since 2002 (basically as long as ICDSoft has been around), though gerenm.net existed at a long-since-forgotten host platform for a few years before moving to ICDSoft.

I’ve lost track of the number of iterations the site has been through. The earliest was hand coded in HTML before even CSS was a “thing”. I also used early versions of Dreamweaver, before settling in to PHP and SQL driven sites, first in Movable Type, and then, WordPress. For a short while, the site lived on Tumblr, but I moved it back to WordPress hosted on ICDSoft after Tumblr got, well, icky.

For about two years, gerenm.net, gerenm.photography, and orchard-studios.com all resided at a single Squarespace site, however changes in the Squarespace platform have reduced its flexibility, while simultaneously increasing the cost. Meanwhile, advances in WordPress have reduced the necessary hands-on maintenance with more choices in design and function. Maintaining the site costs considerably less as well, hence back to WordPress. Getting out of the Squarespace cocoon is not for the feint-of-heart, however. Their exporter was, frankly, terrible-bordering-on-useless. Subsequently, huge swaths of the old site have, once again, simply vanished. While that was initially rather upsetting, I’ve decided that such is the nature of things. Like so many things, that was another time, best left to the past.

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