fyr.io

This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026 for the 4th August group project Tell us all about your very first blog! but it's a day late so shouldn't count towards the Community Builder badge.

I have always found it hard to get personal, whether online or offline. I'm way better offline now I'm a couple decades into adulthood, but online, not so much. I am trying to change that, and I am getting better (as evidenced by recent blog posts.) I have tried to instill privacy-oriented habits online for a long time, though, and those habits are hard to break.

With that in mind, it may come as no surprise that fyr.io isn't my first blog. As far as I recall right now, I have had two 'blogs' before this one, and a bunch of other sites which don't count as blogs. For all of them I worked really hard to stay as anonymous as possible. With future unimaginable technology appropriating and abusing historic online data I'm not sure how open I'll become. Who knows how something as innocuous as how I feel right now could be harnessed and squeezed for financial gain? Or worse?

Geocities - early 2000's - utter garbage nonsense

I mucked about with Geocities when I was a kid and used it as a plaything during some boring IT lessons at school. I remember little of this site, except that it was green on black and was full of complete nonsense! I wrote about various things, none of it real. I invented people, I wrote stories, but mostly I played with what a website was. I was not inspired, I was not enthused with internet is so cool! vibes. It was just to pass the time and exercise my inner desire to write stories in a new way. Eventually I moved on and forgot about it.

I wish I could say that Geocities inspired me, that it opened up the world (wide web) and set me up for life, but 'internet' was something that the technology room at school had. Or that rich people had. It was a chance for me to kick the tyres of something I felt I wasn't worthy of touching.

I did find it very easy though. I just sorta... got it?

Given the blog-like structure of the trash I put on there, I'm gonna class it as my first blog. It was my first experience of "oh, I can put things on the internet?" and set the foundation for later. But, really, don't count it. It's just here because I remembered it just now!

Blogger/Blogspot - 2008 or so - pwn3d!!!1!!one!

I was deep into my late nights learning to code and hack stuff phase, and fully subscribed to Full Disclosure ethos.

I had found a few fairly minor security issues around the tubez and thanks to my younger-self's foray into making a site and writing content, I decided I could do it again, better, and use it to post my 1337 h4x0r findings on a blog for the world to revel in, so off to blogger I went.

I signed up and posted a couple dozen blog posts, thinking I was all that. I also wrote some documentation type stuff on there. Basic stuff like finding SQLi bugs, basic AV bypasses, or tips on getting through a network firewall. There was zero interest and, as far as I could tell, zero readers. I gave up on the endeavour as I ended up getting distracted trying to make a videogame (which just turned into playing lots of video games,) which in turn faded away as I realised this work thing I was doing required some effort to progress if I wanted to earn more money.

I think the blog vanished or I deleted it at some point after that, and nothing of value was lost :)

fyr.io - 2014 onwards - the Real Deal

Since the failed blogger blog, nothing blog-like happened. Sure there were websites made (both personally and at work, I had a web developer role for a little while) and other bits I did online, none of which lived long. I instead focused on work and played video games when not working late or tinkering with code or network stuff, or for a little while in there, writing loads of (very) short fiction.

As I mention in my /about page, fyr.io is in its third or fourth iteration. Back in 2014 I found that the domain was available - I liked that it was short and wanted to get back into building something for the web, but by then had become even more privacy-focused, so never managed to climb over that wall and take those first steps into creating anything. I did register the domain, though, so I guess I managed to take one step.

This site was originally envisaged as a place for me to write documentation for things I learned at work and at home, and I came up with the backronym "for your reference", but no content ever appeared.

I sat on this for a while, doing nothing with it. Then in late 2017 I had written some code for something, and it needed to know what its own public IP address was. At the time there weren't many plaintext, simple IP reflectors, so I whipped one up on a domain I controlled - something short and easy to remember. Thus, ip.fyr.io was born. At that point I decided to write about it somewhere, and the first version of fyr.io being a blog came to life.

This quickly turned into a blog that discussed renovating a new home and angling towards a more self-sustainable life, something we still persue today (though with way more things keeping us distracted from progressing on this front) - many of those early blog posts haven't been migrated here, but I still have them. I'll get around to it, eventually.

Since the early blogging days of fyr.io I've changed things around a bit - I've moved it from a hand-crafted static site to Wordpress, then moved off wordpress to a hand crafted site, and am where I am today, fully submerged in the human side of the web and eager to evolve and grow and do more.

As it stands right now, fyr.io is the only site I maintain. Some of the other projects are still out there, either on a VPS somewhere or hosted on some platform. But they're all abandoned. I consider them relics of a bygone era and if I do re-ignite the idea behind any of them (*cough*writing fiction*cough*) there's a good chance I'll do it on fyr.io, or link back to here from there anyway.