4 ms·

I recently did a history of my old websites: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-professional-websites/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-h

I recently did a history of my old websites: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-professional-websites/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-pro... Most of the content is still there, but it's been shifted between static pages, Rails, Wordpress and now Jekyll. It's neat to see one of these gems still out there; a picture of the 90s web that's still functional and being used. Too many of these sites are lost; only available in the Internet Archives.

WorldMaker 7y ago
I took a similar journey over the years from static pages to custom static generators to PHP to Drupal to a custom Django-based blog engine to Jekyll/static pages. It's interesting because I'm sometimes sad I lost the code for some of those old versions. Those old early PHP and custom static generator codebases would be interesting to revisit with today's ideas, even if just to laugh about. (But also because I know there's probably not-great blog content lost to them.) One of the "custom static generators" I recall was actually a really early not-quite-SPA JS app. I remember it ran really slowly in browsers at the time and worse got slower with each new content added, but these days I wonder if it would seem fine on modern JS engines. (I've got a feeling about the only thing I'd need to change would be to swap `document.write(stuff)` for `element.innerHtml = stuff` and it'd perform quite well today.)