Hello. My name is Eric Alvarado, also known as Eric Arcana. The nickname combines an acronym and an ode from long ago. View my author page to see the articles I have written.
My journey with WordPress began in April of 2005, but my path in computer sciences began decades before. In the 1980s, I was fortunate enough to attend a Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) middle school with computer labs that were equipped with Apple IIe computers.
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
By 13 years of age, I was joyriding in my parents’ 1978 Chevy Nova, had survived a mass shooting in San Ysidro, and a few drive-by shootings in the San Joaquin Valley. For the next five years, I traveled across California and made Santa Monica, The Comedy Store, and a few Los Angeles nightclubs my regular haunts.
When I turned 18, I took the ASVAB to enter the United States Armed Forces but tragedy and consequences caught me. Fortunately, I entered the corporate sector and leaned heavily on my previous computer and mathematical training.
In the winter of 1996, I met the love of my life. We married in 1997 and began to build our family in Southern California. With two children and demanding careers, we still made sure to have date nights and time together.
After years of experience with Usenet and Delphi, I expanded my skills in Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP in 1998. This combination gave me the skills to host and build interactive websites and e-commerce projects outside my corporate career.
One early project turned into a web hosting by accident! As SyntaxTheory, I built a live chat web hosting company that served a GigaNormis amount of 350 web sites… lol. It was fun but YIKES I used a lot of Adobe Flash. I was LiquidChain for a while then sold it off as the unlimited web hosting companies began to flood the market.
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 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.
Although not a commercial success, The Unclean gave me lifelong friends and lessons on building and maintaining online projects. Established on April 29th, 2006, The Unclean was laid to rest on May 27th, 2016 after over 10 years of horror entertainment news and updates.
But, back in 2012, I registered the ArcanaPost.com domain as an online vault and a place to build a series of sandboxes to test features in live environments.
In August of 2017, I was attacked from behind at work. Since the assault, I have focused on rebuilding my life and creating ArcanaPost.
Please note: some details are from my journals; which I began in the summer of 1984. I lost decades of memories and skills to a severe concussion in August of 2017.
