05/23/2023
For the RSS feed readers: if your reader does not display images, please visit the page directly - this post is heavily reliant on images.
I started my website about two years ago now. It originally was on the CBPS server (PS Vita hacking group I’m a part of) at the address swindlesmccoop.cbps.xyz but a couple months later, after I was serious about it, I got my own domain, the one you see right now. Fun fact about that - I almost purchased my domain from Epik literally two days before Epik Fail happened - what a close call. Anyways, I wanted to just take a look at the evolution of this website, which thankfully the Web Archive automatically has taken snapshots of around the times that I have drastically changed it.
All images are clickable and lead to an archived version of the site, allowing you to look through it in your browser by yourself.
I originally designed the site as a place for people who played Monster Hunter: Rise with me to be able to learn more about me and contact me and whatnot.
This is when I started to actually learn stuff about HTML. If you notice, I have the same wallpaper (I recently applied the static filter though) and I still have the Powered by Navi banner on my page, though it now links to LainChan. I started my blog at this point but I don’t think I actually ever even posted on it because it was kind of cumbersome when trying to make a post.
I started getting more traffic to the site and people started telling me more things to change. I got some new fonts, as well as added options to contact.
I wanted to have everything in a box at the center, which you could see that I did. Also, I had first started learning about Uncle Ted, so I had a link to his books. I accidentally made the font too large on that link for a brief moment, and I guess that was the exact moment that the Web Archive had archived it.
I also set up these nice dropdown boxes at the top that I had set up until literally yesterday as of writing this.
I guess this was around the time I wrote my own blogging script, because the RSS feeds are there now. I wrote a script to make an RSS feed from a Gitea user’s commits, which I had active for a while, but Gitea ended up implementing their own solution, and I don’t even use Gitea anymore, I use Github. The RSS feed for the blog was managed by my script, which I was pretty proud of. Like I showed in my last post, I write my blog using LaTeX and a different program I wrote called BlOgTeX, but if you want to look at that old script, it’s here.
This is what the website looked like until about a couple weeks ago as of writing this. I had wanted to overhaul the entire thing for a while, but only recently did I have the motivation and the know-how to actually do so. I have the banners on the page now in their own little box.
The Web Archive happened to capture my website while I was migrating servers. Not relevant, just thought it was kind of funny.
And here we are today. I’m so happy to run my own website, honestly. I think my favorite part is that I can just do whatever I want on it without any limitations (besides storage space). I want to do more in the future, like maybe run a radio station, but that is for future endeavors. My domain expires in a couple months and my server in about half of a year, so we’ll see how things go in the future.