WordPress turned 17 yesterday and I completely missed it.

Thought I would take some time to share what WordPress has done for me since I discovered it back in 2003.

I don’t remember the first site I made with WordPress, but I do remember it being an answer to a problem I had been having.

I had spent a few years learning how to build websites by tinkering with code first using Microsoft Frontpage, then Dreamweaver and finally Notepad++ where I’ve stayed ever since.

The problem with HTML code is when you create more than one web page with it and need to make a change to the layout for all of them, you have to go to each page and update it.

This would usually happen when I needed to add a link to the top menu bar or update the copyright year in the footer.

It was a pain and I had discovered that if I used a coding language called PHP that I could solve my problem by writing a piece of code once and then telling my web pages to include that code wherever I needed the information to show up.

The thing is, I couldn’t figure out how to use PHP.

Usually when I wrote HTML code into a blank text file, I could load that file in a web browser to see what it looked like.

When I did that with PHP, nothing happened.

It just showed the code I wrote instead of the results I was expecting.

Then I found WordPress.

It was a free way to build websites and was written completely in PHP.

The same way I had learned HTML by tinkering with existing code I was able to learn PHP (and later JavaScript) by tinkering with WordPress.

17 years later I’m still tinkering, but I have learned enough to create my own websites and web apps completely from scratch with PHP.

I now have a business that takes care of my family and me because of WordPress.

I have met so many people and have some really good friends because of WordPress.

Happy (Belated) Birthday WordPress!

I’m so glad we got to know each other.