This website serves two purposes

First, To keep my far away family and friends in my thoughts

I am blessed with both a large family and a large number of friends. I don’t call them enough, and really I think about them often. So I like to jot down things I should talk to them about. When I write I here I often imagine what I might talk to them about if we happened to run into them in town

Since this is a very public way to do that, this blog also represents those thoughts that I feel have broad enough appeal to appear on the internet.

Occassionally my wife Laura will make an entry too. She writes for a living so mostly she’s just writing here when I suggest something she’s said _feels_ it fits on Larry.org.

Second, So I can learn and and experiment, play and share

This site was created around 1994 because I could register the domain name Larry.org for free.

For years it was just a holding page that I kept meaning to develop. By 1999 it held a few notes and thoughts, but it wasn’t really organized at all.

That’s when I decided I might as well do something fun with the space. My first try was a good learning experience. I tried some “portal” software that was free and really easy to setup. I learned alot about PHP and MySQL but didn’t really do much to improve on the visitor’s experience. It was a more impressive disorganized site with a few thoughts on it.

So after doing the “portal” thing for about two years the site was starting to get to be too hard to manage for the time I had available to develop it. So I switched to something simpler. At the time I settled on what would become the b2 blogging system. That lasted about 3 years until b2 died due to lack of development. I played around with some other systems before settling on Wordpress. I stayed with wordpress from 2003 to 2006.

Then in 2006 I decided to try out Ruby On Rails and ended up on Mephisto, and now finally SimpleLog.

Since about 2002 I’ve been carrying all my writing along to each version, I will continue that, unless I don’t.