Welcome Back

Welcome to the fourth redesign of my personal website. I've been working on my own personal website since about 1998. In that time it has had four designs, which roughly follow the evolution of the web.

Here are links to my previous designs. Only the homepage works on these sites. I have removed the content, as most of it has been ported to my latest site.

The first design of my site, put online in 1998, was hosted on the long ago defunct GeoCities. It is perhaps a good representation of sites from the late 90s, being frame based, part of a webring and generally looking uninteresing.

The second design of my site, went live around 2001 and has been self-hosted on nearlyfreespeech.com since 2006. I was experimenting with layouts, javascript and all sorts of pointless fun. I even coded up a, still functional, game of Sokoban in JavaScript.

For the third version of my site, online around 2010, I tried something different. I created a splash screen with links to content hosted elsewhere. Either on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or on my WordPress blog. This seemed to follow a trend of the time, which was to not bother with self-hosting and all the work that goes with that. Whilst at first my Wordpress blog was self-hosted, it didn't take long before I decided the effort involved wasn't worth it and migrated to WordPress.com

This current version of my site went live in January 2021. It still needs to have my posts migrated from my WordPress site. Again, it feels like I am following a trend back to publishing in plain HTML and CSS. No server side application, it simply serves static pages. Since I have long ago stopped developing sites for a living, I can no longer follow the complexities of JavaScript frameworks. So this is a static site, generated using Eleventy on my laptop, versioned using GitHub and then FTP'd to my hosting space with nearlyfreespeech.com.

It's certainly brought the fun back to hosting my own website. I enjoy writing my own HTML markup, dabbling in CSS and hopefully creating an accessible, quick loading, low maintenance, future proof website with no locked in dependencies on anyone else.

Thanks for visiting!