The Archives

This site was first launched in the last few months of 2017, when I was still in primary school. Since then, a lot has happened. I’ve torn down and rebuilt the site countless of times. With this page I hope to offer some insight into the development and creative process that shaped the site as it is today.

When I started out on my webdevelopment journey, I was blissfully unaware of literally anything. This includes version control. I recovered older versions of the site from backups, folders called v0.1, v0.3.4 etc. I also lost a bunch of versions, and lots backups contained so much buggy and insecure PHP (think of exposing the file system for arbitrary use via a GUI), that I didn’t dare to reupload it.

Anyways, here’s a non-exhaustive list of previous versions of this site. Beware of the (many) dead links :)

2: Based on CoderDojo Nano

The site is still very much a work-in-progress at this stage. You can also clearly see the resemblance to the example site from the CoderDojo Nano book I used to write it.

The site originally featured a nice background of some canyon with a waterfall in it. However, inexperienced as I was, I directly hotlinked to the image instead of downloading and serving it myself. Oof! The site that was hosting the image is no longer hosting it, and any trace of it has vanished from the Web. Well, shit happens I guess.
3: Fancy blue squares

I wanted to experiment some more and put fancy blue squares everywhere :)
4: Inspired by Jeugdjournaal.nl

This version was heavily inspired by the design of the Jeugdjournaal site, a news show we used to watch in primary school.
5: I discovered parallax…
6: There comes JS…

At this point I discovered W3Schools and completely went over-the-top with JS-powered widgets, slideshows and what-not. Ew.
7: very gray
8: still my favorite :D

This version is very special to me. The design is brilliantly simple. I love it! This is also when I started experimenting with writing my own JavaScript and PHP, instead of copy-pasting stuff in, like I did before. I learned so much while writing this, most of it because of two amazing teachers who spent their free time teaching me how to write PHP at CoderDojo.
9: Unified a bunch of sites

At this point I wrote a bunch of different websites and “apps” that were scattered all over the place. I decided to unify them under a single navigation bar, inspired by the way Google apps share a common menu in the top-right. This is also the moment I decided to drop the undercover spy content that had been the main topic of the site for almost two years at that point. Instead, I proudly presented my projects on the homepage.
12: Very much a W3Schools look
13: Time to get more professional
14: Learning how APIs work
15: read a book on design
16: Very into the IndieWeb
17: lets make it pink!
18: less is more ;)

I still liked pink, but I wanted something more simple, and something that better reflected my ideals regarding webdevelopment. So, I redesigned the site according to best practices for inclusive textual websites . It has a heavy focus on correctness, adaptability, accessibility, security, performance and sustainability. This iteration of the site was heavily inspired by various versions of bt.ht, seirdy.one and drewdevault.com.
19: art? (current version)

While I was very pleased with the previous interation of my site, I felt like it constrained me too much. Don’t get me wrong, it worked wonderfully, and ticked all the boxes for what I consider a great website. However, I felt like it didn’t fully capture me. So, I redesigned again. I went with a very simple monochrome color palette, based on the colors and fonts the from the user agent. This iteration was inspired by 100r.co, mat.tl, wesleyac.com, bt.ht, and rubenerd.com. I like it a lot, it feels more free-form and somehow very cozy.

For reasons still unknown, I decided to handcode again, which I hadn’t done since at least version 15. I like it tho; it allows me to perfectionate the HTML, which I couldn’t really do with Markdown.