renaissance chambara retrospective

2 minutes estimated reading time

renaissance chambara retrospective – whilst looking at something else I decided to do an animated GIF showing what my blog had looked like in various incarnations over the years.

I didn’t even remember a few of the designs in the finished GIF.

Disappointingly flickr doesn’t host animated GIFs so had to use another service instead.
renaissance chambara since 2004

make animated gifs like this at MakeaGif

Before there was the website this was a contributed strand to an online community founded by Tony Perkins who had previously founded Red Herring magazine. Red Herring was one of the go to media for the original dot.com boom and bust. The site ran on a CMS called Netmodular and provided a community experience somewhat like Facebook, but more specialised.

The AlwaysOn Network went through a number of changes. So I decided to strike out on my own with my writing. This was partly precipitated by my playing with platforms to work out how they could be useful for clients.

I eventually went with Blogspot because it was free and had a good community at the time. The platform was easy to use and customise (in a similar manner to the way MySpace or Bebo were later on). Eventually, I wanted something that felt a bit more professional and the website moved from Blogspot to WordPress on Yahoo! Small Business Hosting.

I chose Yahoo! Small Business Hosting for my first WordPress blog because I got a staff discount.  This decision was disastrous. I lost a good deal of my content, which I tried to recover via the Google cache and was partially successful. I then moved on to Media Temple as my hosting provider.

The design of the site changed a bit over time, partly because the themes that I used were no long being updated from a technology point of view. I was very influenced by Derek Powazek’s approach to blog design with a single column of content.

It turns out that doesn’t completely break down when you go through the site using a mobile device. Anyway that’s the renaissance chambara retrospective. Let’s see what the next 13 years of blogging will bring…. More on the transitory nature of the web here.