Howdy. I'm Jamin. This is my blog, Se7enet.

So I've had this domain for ages. It's older than my marriage. It's been my email forever. And I used to have something here, many moons ago. It went through various iterations. Mostly all of them were a blog of some sort, or at least something reasonably similar to a blog. I think at the very beginning it was just hand-written HTML that I updated manually. Then I got into PHP and started building it in that, with better functionality, database storage, commenting, and such. Horrendous procedural PHP monstrosities that I'd be ashamed of, now, certainly. Toward the end I was using WordPress, getting themes and hacking them up or customizing them.

Then, something like a dozen or so years ago, I just sorta... stopped. Life got in the way. Kids. Work. Whatever. You know. Got longer and longer between posts. Blogs as a thing were largely over, by that point. Bigger ones still existed, and Tumblr is obviously still a thing, but the heyday of blogging just for the sake of it was definitely in the past. I never really had a large audience in the first place, so its not like I was disappointing a ton of people or anything. At any rate, I finally admitted defeat and shut the site down.

And down it has stayed. Until now! Now it's back!

We've come full circle. Well, kinda. Not all the way back to hand-written HTML, thank FSM. But we are back to my own PHP, though. This time using Laravel, which I've been using professionally for a bunch of years now. It's just a basic thing at the moment. Backend in Laravel 11, frontend in Tailwind. The admin functionality is just Filament panels. A couple Spatie packages. A sprinkling of FontAwesome. That's it. Nothing fancy. If I get any ideas in my head about new features, I'll add them as I feel so inclined. Searching and comments are probably gonna have to get built eventually, but that's Future Me's problem.

There are some issues I've noticed, but nothing I can't live with at the moment. I'll fix them as I need to. Like, the Markdown package I'm using that provides code syntax highlighting doesn't seem to support light and dark mode, it's one or the other, always. So as it sits, right now, if I make a post that has a code block in it (and I'm a programmer, so that's definitely gonna be a thing...), it would look terrible if the site were in light mode, because that one block would always render in dark mode no matter what. So I don't have a solution for that, yet. But I also don't need to make a post with a code block in it right this second, so I'm ok with putting this out there for now, and fixing it or looking for an alternative solution once I get settled in and start wanting to make code posts. Stuff like that.

I don't really know where all this will go or how long it will last or how often I'll post. No plans, really. I had a lot of fun building this site for a weekend or two, and that's about as far as I got. There's an About blurb down at the bottom of the page, it's got some of my interests in there. I'm sure most of that will show up here. I have a handful of various little "side project" ideas and experiments - mostly Laravel, but starting to get into Python and some other stuff as well. As far as actual code goes, it'll likely go on my Github (that's linked over in the sidebar, or toward the bottom of the page if you're on mobile), but I'll still talk about it here.

Alrighty, well, I suppose that's enough for tonight. Enjoy the site. More to come!