21 years on the internet

A month after starting this WordPress powered playground, way back in November 2005, I gave it its own domain and made a promise:

“Bookmark it! It ain’t going no where now“

It went somewhere… Three domains and a dozen themes later, here we are.

This week, my little corner of the internet turned Twenty-One. So I finally gave it the spring clean I’d been avoiding for years. With a team of robotic overlords. Lifting old band-aids, and fixing posts (the 2026 correct way) was incredibly satisfying (and gory). The surprising fun part was reading what younger me had to say. Plenty of cringe too.

Postcards from 2005

My very first post was a how-to for Skype. You’d need a headset (about R70) and my 90kb wireless connection. “A slight delay sometimes, but hey can’t complain, it’s free!” Skype has since been retired.

A few weeks later I tried to explain what a blog actually is. There were 50 million of them, which made me feel like “a very small fish in a very big sea”. Most of that sea has since dried up.

Then there’s this one about a 1TB iPod, with a throwaway line at the bottom: “What else is perhaps on the cards: Apple iPhones”. Fourteen months before the iPhone. CNN said it first, but I’ll take it.

Digging up the link rot

Twenty-one years of the web had turned my archive into a bit of a graveyard: missing images, dead videos, links to addresses that no longer exist. Fixing it turned into a bit of digital archaeology.

• The stranded folder. I thought I’d lost my first 6 months of images I’d used in my blog posts. Before WordPress had a media library, I FTP’d everything into a folder I’d made myself. It never made the move to my current domain. The Internet Archive kept it, so 38 of its 42 images are back.
• The missing film. In 2010 I shared a short film by Zack Arias, hosted on blip.tv. Blip.tv is long gone, and the video with it. But Kyle Steed, who I quoted in that post, had linked the same address, and his post survived in the Archive. That was enough to match it to the film on Zack’s own YouTube channel. The same for a heap of other videos.
• Words trapped in pictures. Tony Hsieh’s “Chase the vision” quote only ever existed as an image. Now it’s immortalised, and is actual text you can read and copy.
• The beer labels. The photo of us screen-printing labels for our home brew was gone from everywhere except the Internet Archive.

Some things are gone for good. A 2005 photo of SpongeBob “spotted in South Africa” was never archived. That’s ok.

An ode to the past

While I was in there, I gave the place a fresh coat of paint. More technically, I forked the wonderful Bjork theme, by Anders Norén, that I’ve been using the past few years. As my child theme grew larger and more diverse it made more sense to bake my own theme.

Visually I borrowed from how we used to communicate and share news: polaroid prints, typewriter fonts, airmail stripes. The postage stamps on the homepage are a little personal reminder of the postcards that my Dad used to send me from England in the ’90s. And more occasionally the ones I would send him back.

There’s a new Finds section for things I’m watching, reading and listening to.

And posts now end with “Write back” instead of “Leave a comment”. In 2021 I asked who still comments on blogs. This is my attempt at getting an answer.

Old links, even my original .htm addresses from 2005, should all land on the right post. If one doesn’t, write back and tell me.

Bookmark it! It ain’t going no where now 🙂