My [as] website is 10 years old today!

Posted on (Updated: November 30, 2016) by Alex Schreyer

They grow up so fast, don’t they?

As you may have noticed, I have completely redesigned my site. The older design – while nice – wasn’t a responsive design. It also wasn’t as flexible in terms of content placement as I would have liked it to be. So I completely overhauled it. The new design is also based on the excellent (bare-bones) Underscores framework for WordPress. While it seemed to be a bit convoluted at first, I quickly noticed how well-written that code actually was and how fast I could get my new design up and running.

So – long story short – below (and all around this text) is the new design. I hope you like it.

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2016: I finally redesigned the site to be fully responsive and gave my images a better prominence.

While updating all the content on this site, I noticed that I started using WordPress exactly ten years ago. As you can see in the first post on this site (link is below), I switched to WordPress in 2006 and haven’t regretted it since. I believe it is – by far – the best web hosting platform out there. And it is getting better with each release and every new plugin that is being written for it.

New & Old Website

History

In case you are interested, the images below illustrate the development of this site:

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2007: Early beginnings with monthly changing header images and the core categories in place
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2010: The “tabbed notebook” design is in place and I am trying to highlight some posts. Also, see the Twitter integration (while it was OK to do it that way)
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2015: A bunch more social linkages are in place. Also, the header was a WebGL interactive element.

Want to know how it all started?

I actually ran a basic HTML-based site since my studies at UBC. Here is my first Geocities (remember that?) website from 2001:

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2001: A table-based HTML layout.

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