Dogwonder

Day 1 – Origin story #WP20

est. May 9, 2023

As part of the WordPress 20th Anniversary, I’ve decided to take up this challenge of 20 days of small, WordPress-related actions. Which in my case will likely be mostly blogging.

Prompt 1/20

It all started in 2004 on WordPress 1.0.1 “Miles”, not quite the full 20 but not that far off either. I think this was even before plugins existed.

Why

No idea, I’d been messing with WordPress for a few months. I had set up a little comedy blog with some mates in 2003 on WordPress. So when it came to building my blog I decided to use WordPress (I might have had a blogger prior to that). Completely forgotten where I had heard of it, but was reading blogs / Weblogs at that point so maybe via one of those (kottke.org?). Most likely I had read about someone that had migrated from MovableType over to WordPress and I thought that sounds like fun. Who knows.

What

My first post was a quote from Jean Baudrillard on 10th March 2004, in a (slightly) pretentious ‘I read philosophy’ stage of my mid 20s I liked a lot of the French postmodernists writings. But in many ways the post still stands up now:

“Virtuality, being itself virtual, does not really happen. One lives in the very Rousseauistic idea that there is in nature a good use for things that can and must be tried. I don’t think that it is possible to find a politics of virtuality, a code of ethics of virtuality because virtuality virtualizes politics as well: there will be no politics of virtuality, because politics has become virtual; there will be no code of ethics of virtuality, because the code of ethics has become virtual, that is, there are no more references to a value system.”
Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity

How

The first timestamp I could find on the original blog theme was 20th February 2004 (it still exists, more on that closer to the 20th Anniversary). Given this is over 19 years old it’s not entirely unrecognisable.

The loop is there. Still here.

It’s CSS / HTML / PHP and a sprinkling of JS (image hover effects mostly) so a lesson there. Use fundamentals.

Yeah, there is some XML / XSLT showing its age somewhat but I was surprised how stable it all still is.

But check out this CSS.

#container3 {
	width: 475px;
	margin: 0 auto;
	padding: 0;
	text-align: left;
	background-color: RGB(255,255,255);
	border-top: 10px;
	border-right: 10px;
	border-bottom: 1px;
	border-left: 10px;
	border-style: solid;
	border-color: RGB(255,255,255);
	position: relative;
}

475px!!! We were still optimising for 640px back then, CRTs and similar ancient tech. 256 colors (well 216 really), also I appear to be using borders as padding. Now given I still struggle with the box model this is not surprising. Also I wonder why I used RGB rather than HEX?

Nothing too surprising in the CSS although this stood out.

#menu1, #menu2, #menu3 {
	display: block;
	width: 493px;
	height: 19px;
	voice-family: "\"}\"";   /* Need we explain? */
	voice-family: inherit;   
}

WTAF. ‘Need we explain?’ yes, yes we should. I forgot how many weird hacks we used to have to do. Netscape 7, IE6. It was crunchy. Very crunchy. I was so used to having to do weird shit I forget how blessed we are today.

Anyways, that’s the start. 2004.

Spring is here…

est. April 1, 2023

….as I’ve changed the season on my LEGO® Bonsai

January challenge

est. March 17, 2023

During the month of January my wife suggested a challenge for both of us to do a drawing every day for the month, as something new and fun to do (we are both also Art graduates having met at University in the 90s).

The specific type of drawing was to be a map.

And we did it. Here are my drawings for the month.

Day 1 - Map featuring a road and mountains and tress - Pen

Day 2 - Map featuring a ring road and some buildings - Pen

19….n n n n n n n n n 19

est. March 10, 2023

A poor title that both shows my and thus this blog’s age. As March the 10th is 19 NINETEEN years since I wrote my first post on this blog.

Obligatory link to said first post (I still don’t understand Pingbacks, never will). I like to think that the search function to retrieve that post had to work really hard to get it from such a long time ago. Like internet mining.

Talking about mining, this year I blogged 9, NINE times, and that’s nothing to do with Tw*tter Leeroy Jenkinsing into even more of a hellscape because some narcissist thought it would be lolz.

No, nothing to with that.

In unrelated news I stopped using Tw*tter. It wasn’t easy, the urge to reach for that sweet sweet hit of information was strong. Breaking news events left me waiting for traditional news orgs to catch up, I had no idea what was going on in Eurovision. It was hard.

I moved to Mastodon, started from almost scratch (I did initially set up my account in 2017, but had only posted once and only followed a handful of people). It’s different, I chose for it to be different also, I intentionally avoided politics / journalists accounts. I missed being hyper-informed but my mental health was the main beneficiary. The Daily Outrage ™ / Daily Pile-on ™ / Culture War Du Jour ™ was suddenly not there, I would still probably read about it in the Gruaniad but its power was sapped and I was not party to some client journalist / social media mob pouring petrol on a nuanced topic. I followed mostly tech accounts as well as some funny / interesting / good people. It’s more chill, I still get my fix of great tech articles and have seen a notable uptick in people blogging. This is all good.

I’ve continued to build WordPress websites professionally and found a new love for something that itself is due to be 20 this year, TWENTY! So this blog is not far behind. Crazy. I’ve embraced a lot of the new tech for WordPress this year and am eagerly building out sights using the block editor. I rebuilt this site as a Full Site Editing theme, however it wasn’t to my liking, great as it is, I am a developer I like a lot of the no-code tools but I also love coding, finely crafting something with HTML / CSS / JS / PHP so I’ve generally taken a hybrid approach, I still build out themes, but will leverage blocks and block patterns allowing more to be done in the editor.

I’ve also built a bunch of sites using Eleventy and also love using this. Version 2.0 came out and it’s ace, so much goodness and very much in the spirit of early web dev, it gets out the way to allow you to build websites but with superpowers.

I’ve kept a few side hustle projects going.

I’ve started to use AI in my workflow, it’s like magic. I am able to do much more around the edges of my abilities – I am no back-end developer so being able to explain what I want and the AI to present it on a silver platter with a little silver fork anagrammed with my initials is wonderful. I have more time to spend on the things I want like renaming class names, so win win.

Otherwise the earth still spins, I still stand on it spinning, many good and bad things happen whilst I stand on it spinning. And I continue to blog. Onwards.