If you have a look at the links across this site, in particular the nav links and featured projects, you may notice they seem to be taking you to a random assortment of domains and websites with no coherent guiding principle. The deeper you dig, the more convoluted it gets, too. This article is an attempt to apply some method to that madness, and if nothing else, deliver some rules, motivations, and anecdotes about how and why the content on this site has traditionally been divided up the way it has.
cflems.net
This is the O.G. site that I've had up since the summer before my junior year of high school, but
it's far from my first website in general (that being cfagency.org, see if you can guess why that
domain didn't last...) Following on the heels of several uninspiring antecedent resume-esque
websites, including but not limited to cfl3ming.com (Someone bought cfleming.com shortly after
I turned 11, should've been acquiring digital real estate instead of starting middle school I guess. I even found the guy on LinkedIn and he still won't sell it to me :(.), this site resulted
from a compromise between two competing agendas:
- I wanted a centralized "home base" / network where I could route server hostnames for different projects and set up vanity emails; and
- my parents wanted me to get a job.
In order to get a job in software as a 16-year-old I needed something to the effect of a portfolio that I could slap onto my resume and say "hey I actually know how to do this shit I'm not bullshitting you", especially since all the items on there were uh... high school clubs... Given that my home base network had no real need of a web presence, that was to be the place where the portfolio would live.
As an aside, I really cannot pin down at what age my style started not to be awful. I revisited my website from when I was like 11-14 and that codebase is legitimately an eldritch terror, despite my maintaining it up until 17. On the other hand, everything on this site and/or Bulletin, which happened at 16, is fairly reasonable. Perhaps having the architecture done by an eleven year old was just an insurmountable obstacle.
To this day, cflems.net serves similar purposes to its network-y vision:
- It's the base for all my server hostnames and vanity emails.
- It hosts war, which holds all my
bashrcfiles, handy scripts, and host identity information for rapidly deploying to new shell environments. - It hosts an internal webmail client.
- It serves as the root for mail security config used across the entire network, such as the root SPF record for all domains in the fleet.
At the same time, it continues to host a portfolio of what rare and moderately outdated projects I'm permitted to share with the world these days, as well as serving as the only authoritative domain from which information sourced to me should originate. The portfolio-esque functionality might one day move to cflems.com or cflems.org, though, since I have a feeling those TLDs are perhaps a bit more conformant to the professional aesthetic.
cflems.io
In total contrast, cflems.io is the blast zone. Everything up there is a test, a project of some
experimental nature, a live demo of some software, and though everything up there is authored by
me, it can in no way be considered to be "my website". It is effectively a warehouse full of
notional information and random one-off shit that will never see the light of day again.
Fun examples of stuff that lives here include:
- Bulletin, restored from the grave six years later and with zero users.
- Some fun Human Language Syntax Stuff that was very literally for an art class.
- A Party Poster that I made on a beer-soaked table fifteen minutes before debuting it at said function.
cflems.github.io
This site exists exclusively because I was tired of trying to format my resume in Google docs and thought I could do it better by hand. I could.
fle.ms
The gist of this one should be fairly obvious at least, this is my URL shortener and it will be
used to provide nice memorable permalinks for important articles. The domain mostly just exists
for vanity purposes, but there are a couple of other benefits, such as hosting a mirror of
cdn.cflems.net on c.fle.ms and having [email protected] as a short alias of [email protected].
Back in the day I used to have a URL shortener at yon.se, and now that I have a
job I've enjoyed set out to restore a bunch of my old projects and holdings that I originally had
to drop due to the financial constraints produced by budget comprised entirely of lunch money, but
sadly that domain has been parked and I will not be dropping $2k on a domain just for the sake of
nostalgia. In a way, building out fle.ms was just an attempt to chase that high again and now I'm
making up use cases for it on the fly. Depressingly, so far the best one has been transferring
Zoom links, that for some reason people insist on texting to me, to my laptop where I can actually
open them. What's more depressing about that is that I've graduated college and still have to keep
Zoom on my laptop, though.
GitHub
This site is more of a metadata and/or commentary store, so I try to host all the actual code on my GitHub to avoid an annoying two-stage deploy process. I want people to be able to find my projects through the social networking aspect, so just deferring to them saves a great deal of time and effort. The exception to that is, of course, projects that probably should not be freely released into the wild such as the elf-eater virus.
And that's it, that's how the site works.