Hello. My name is Eric Alvarado, also known as Eric Arcana. The nickname is a combination acronym and an ode to a time long ago. I am the founder of ArcanaPost and you can view my author page to see all of the posts that I have created.
My journey with WordPress began in April of 2005, but my path in programming began decades before. In the 1980s, I attended a gifted and talented education (GATE) middle school with computer labs powered by the Apple IIe.
It was also in the 1980s that I began keeping handwritten journals of my life and the lives around me. My youth was filled with promise, expectation, and tragedy; as it is for many.
I learned about the fragility and impermanence of life at a young age
Eric, ArcanaPost
At the age of 13, I began taking my parents’ 1978 Chevy Nova for drives across California. For the proceeding half-decade, I traversed the state and made The Comedy Store and a few Los Angeles nightclubs my stomping grounds.
When I turned 18, I took the ASVAB to enter the Air Force as an engineer but ultimately did not take that path. Instead, I entered the corporate sector where my computer and math skills propelled me.
After years of personal experience with Usenet and Delphi, I began to learn Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP in 1998. This combination gave me the skill to host and build interactive websites and e-commerce projects outside of my corporate career.
In April of 2000, I began to use and work on PHP-Nuke projects until I was asked to join a fork called PostNuke in late 2001. Then in June of 2002, Greg Allan (aka Adam_Baum), my online friend, the lead core developer, and one of the four founding members of PostNuke passed away. I watched as the community fractured while I was hosting websites, building projects for others, maintaining a demanding corporate career, and raising two kids with my wife. I left PostNuke and the Open Source community to focus on my family and career in the Winter of 2002.
I miss it all, but for the first time in years, I am happy
Letting Go, November 2002
As my corporate career took off, I worked less overtime and began to feel the itch to code. I returned to programming and began building with WordPress in 2005. I built a few projects for fun and personal knowledge. Implementing forums and user-generated content, I built a small horror-based online community called The Unclean.
I registered ArcanaPost in 2012 as a sandbox to create advanced features for The Unclean and future projects. Although not a commercial success, The Unclean gave me lifelong friends and lessons on building and maintaining online projects. Established on April 29th of 2006, The Unclean was laid to rest on May 27th of 2016 after over 10 years of horror entertainment news and updates.
In late 2016 I began to build a new project but was attacked and nearly killed in August of 2017. The violence, damage, and way I was treated by local officials forced me to end that project. The project was named after the place I was attacked and seeing it daily was not healthy. Through that pain, with my life’s work at hand, I began anew using this old sandbox domain, ArcanaPost.
Please note: some details of this entry come from my personal journals; which I began in the summer of 1984. I lost decades of memories and skills to a severe concussion in August of 2017.
