Thanks for sharing your story, Justin. It's great that you've been able to develop your own system after all these years. I still hope, one day, to be able to launch a WP plugin.

My first thought when I saw the title of this article was: Love how it's taken so many years for someone to finally ask the question (a few too many but who's counting?) but like others, I wandered through Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod, before starting on a more dynamic journey with CuteNews (flat file), Mambo, Joomla etc. before stumbling upon WordPress. It was easy to work with and had lots of functionality out of the box that could get a site up-and-running quickly but leave lots of room for tinkering, not to mention all the plugins and themes, even then!

The fact that Justin and Jeff are still active in the WordPress sphere is testament also to its community (I'm almost certain I saw an article about Brian Gardner on this site?). I still recall how Jeff had his Jeffro2pto site and how excited I was to get a response from Lorelle.

Sadly I've not been able to use WordPress as much as I would have liked nowadays compared to before, but will have to start visiting WPTavern more in future to keep up with the latest WP developments.