[mod]

> flat text file like a very ghetto database

My second site was a blog in about 1998. I had never heard of a blog, but whatever. I built a user system, "karma" system, ability to spend karma (anyone with enough karma could post on my front page), an interactive choose-your-own-adventure story where you got to help write it, and some other features I'm forgetting.

Anyway, I built all that with flat files at first, because I hadn't heard the word "database" yet--even though I wrote this in PHP. As soon as I heard about databases, I converted it in a couple days.