About MBoffin.com

What does “MBoffin” mean?

Nothing. There’s no special meaning behind the name. Back in the 90s, when Microsoft had released Windows 95, there happened to be a system file that held the currently-logged-in user’s user/pass in plaintext. However, finding that little nugget of information in this huge system file was tough. It turned out that if I searched for the ASCII/hex combo of M xB0 xFF I N, it dropped me right down to the right place in the file. A short while later I needed a username for a multiplayer game. I changed the capitalization of that ASCII/hex mish-mash to “MBoffin” (pronounced em-boffin) and the rest is history.

History of MBoffin.com

This site has always been a playground of sorts as I learn new technologies. It used to change design and underlying technology every three months or so as I learned and played with new things.

However, in the early 2000’s I created a fairly complete blog/forum/CMS engine in ASP.Net and the site started to get used regularly by quite a few people. At this point I didn’t feel like I could monkey with the site too much, because it had turned into a community web site that people (including myself) used on a daily basis to post and discuss interesting things we were finding online.

A couple years later, sites where people could post media-specific content started growing in popularity and use. Flickr was taking over the posting of photos, YouTube was taking over the posting of videos, Digg and Reddit were taking over the posting of interesting articles, and so on. Using a single site (like mine) for posting and discussing stuff started to fall out of use. Eventually this site just died.

That was about a decade ago. The site’s been laying fallow since then and just causing support headaches for my hosting company as it got older and older. (Sorry, Mike!)

But now? All the old content has been backed up and archived. The entire site is now run by Hugo, meaning it’s just a bunch of static HTML and CSS. No more support headaches, it’s easy to update, and actually useful to me again. Hooray! :)