April 11th, 2005

I was over at Jon Hicks’ site and saw he had done an entry on the his­tory of his site. It seemed like a great idea to go thru the old designs of my site and see how it’s evolved over the years. I’m still in the process of learn­ing the fine art of CSS, XHTML, and web design in gen­eral, but it’s amaz­ing to see how far I’ve come in the past few years. Below is a mag­i­cal jour­ney down memory lane.

2002 - Ver­sion 1 of my blog. Before this I had used a blog­ger site, and my first ver­sion was basi­cally a slightly mod­i­fied Mov­able Type tem­plate. I had a basic knowl­edge of css (which MT used and still uses for it’s tem­plates), so the site was rather ugly.

2003-2004. Ver­sion 2 was the first true ver­sion, as it’s the first I made from scratch. I was going for a dis­tinc­tive look and feel with the posts and com­ments look­ing like ripped paper, but hon­estly I didn’t have the pho­to­shop skill or the time to make it happen the way I wanted. What resulted was a rather half-​hearted attempt at a ‘cool’ web site. I never even got to finish the entire thing, so the side­bars are just sit­ting in space, with no treat­ment. Sadly, it was table based and really ran poorly. It was around this time i learned about web stan­dards via Mr. Zeld­man and Eric Meyer’s books. Below was my first attempt at pure CSS/XHTML layout.

Late 2004 brought us ver­sion 3 of the site. White it wasn’t too pretty, it was a pure CSS layout, and I was so proud of what I had accom­plished. While it was just a few simple floats with a header and a footer, I felt like a web design GOD ;-) .

And that brings us to now (late 2004-now) . I’m to the point where I’m pretty com­fort­able with web design, this ver­sion - we’ll call it ver­sion 3.5 - has a lot of improve­ments over it’s pre­de­ces­sors. Sure, it’s still the clas­sic “blog” layout, but I’ll get around to giving this place a bit more char­ac­ter on the next major revi­sion. For now, I’m more con­cerned with ham­mer­ing out any remain­ing bugs in the layout and learn­ing more about standards-​based layout.

It’s amaz­ing how much things have changed over the past few years in the web design world - and how much I’ve learned as well. It’s an excit­ing time to be part of this indus­try, as I feel we’ve only begun to see what we’re capa­ble of with web stan­dards and design in gen­eral.

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