The old site has been retired and is now available at 2002-2012.mattwilcox.net, URLs to old articles should be redirecting there already.
As for the main domain; I don't know for sure what I'm doing here yet. I'm currently taking my first steps with a VPS, with nginx & node.js, and making my way through 7 Databases in 7 weeks - the time seemed right to rip up the old and learn something new. There's a lot of 'new' to learn.
Why learn so much new stuff rather than refresh my PHP/MySQL knowledge?
Because in my day-job I'm really a front-end coder, not a back-end coder. The knowledge I have about back-end code is 8yrs out of date. It seemed stupid to update my knowledge of these two languages given how little work I do in either. That said; I do want to learn some stuff and do fancy having a go at new server things again. With Node, I get to use JavaScript - a language I'm familiar with in my day-job - on the back-end, which will in turn help hone my front-end JavaScript skills. Learning how to set up a VPS gives me a lot of flexibility over just using standard shared-server hosting. It's also a ton faster. I'm using Nginx rather than Apache, and (so far) it has not been hard to learn and the pay-off is it's crazy fast. As for databases... that's why I'm reading the book. There is a lot more choice in databases now than there was 8yrs ago when I last learned. They all have different strengths, and I'm learning what those are.
-Matt