Another year has gone by, and somehow I’m still doing this. 🙂
As I’ve mentioned numerous times, last year was tough year for me. So far this year is going better. That’s partly because I’ve reduced the amount of travelling I’m planning to do, which has freed me to do more fun stuff, like writing and doing the odd video.
As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year.
- In July I will hit the big five zero.
- 24 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
- 19 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or Current name: 31 August 2001)
- 14 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
- 13 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
- A combined 2 years as an Oracle Developer Champion, now renamed to Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador. (21 June 2017)
I thought it would be fun to do a little time travel and look at the website over the years. There were a few really bizarre things I tried out in the early days, including a Gothic horror theme, but I don’t have a record of them and the Way Back Machine only goes back to 2001. You know you are old when the Way Back Machine can’t go that far back! 🙂
So skipping the first year of existence and starting in 2001 the site looked like this.
This was still using the old name before I switched to the current name and URL.
Later in 2001 I started putting the latest articles on the front page and the menu includes link to my Oracle 9i articles. Bleeding edge! 🙂
Things stayed pretty similar looking until 2006, where a new column was added to the front page. I put a rating system in place for the articles, but didn’t know how to stop the search engine spiders from clicking them, so pretty much everything got something like a 2.5 star rating. I quickly removed that and salvaged what little pride I had left.
In 2010 I tried to clean up the look of the site a lot. I removed the left had menu bar and used tabs and quick links instead. I think this was the beginning of the site looking a little more like it does today.
In 2011 I got a bit sick of the washed out colours and increased the contrast. The basic layout is the same though.
Things stayed pretty much the same until 2015, when I switched the site over to use Bootstrap 3. Prior to this I was forever tweaking things for browser compatibility, and having a responsive design was way beyond my meagre web skills. Bootstrap solved loads of problems for me.
The upgrade to Bootstrap 4 a few days ago made some slight changes, but I’m guessing hardly anyone would notice.
This time next year, the site will look … exactly the same. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Congrats!