Twenty years of my own websites, in order

I have been making my own websites since 2005, and until recently I could not have told you how many there had been. The answer is eleven, if you count the two that never left my hard drive, and going through them in order is a fairly efficient way to feel old.

The shape of it

The arc is almost embarrassingly typical. Tables and a frameset. Then divs and floats, and a long stretch where every site had a three-column layout it did not need. Then a CMS, because I had convinced myself that writing a post should involve a login screen. Then a framework, then a different framework, then a static site generator, then a different static site generator.

And now: plain files, built once, served from the edge. Which is roughly where I started, except the files are generated and the edge is not a friend’s spare server.

What actually survived

Not the code. None of it runs. The PHP needs a version that no longer exists, the jQuery plugins are 404s, and one site depended on a Flash object I cannot even open to look at.

What survived is the writing, and only because it was in the database backups I kept out of superstition rather than plan. Every migration lost something — the 2009 site’s comments are gone entirely, and the 2013 one has posts with broken image references I have never gone back to fix.

The lesson I keep re-learning is that the content is the asset and the site is the packaging, and I have spent something like twenty years putting almost all of my effort into the packaging.

The archive shelf

So the old ones are on the workshop page now, on a shelf of their own, drawn in dashed lines because none of them are running. They are not portfolio pieces. They are more like a set of photographs where the interesting thing is what I thought was worth doing at the time.