Redesigning my blog
I am in the process of migrating my homelab to nomad and came over some of my older iterations of my web sites, all the way back to when I was 15 years old and just discovered that I could write text in notepad and get it to appear on the internet, so in homage to that I wanted to go a trip down memory lane and perhaps take these designs into the future.
Hello, world!
This was my first web page I ever “published”. It was part of a school project where we should present Norwegian consumer rights, and since I was a young kid that rather wanted to play with my computer than do the project, I volunteered to make a web site instead of a power point presentation. I made the background gif by myself using Microsoft Paint and I had just discovered other browsers than Internet Explorer and gotten a shiny new LCD monitor so I decided that I would target Opera and a resolution of 1280x1024. When I try opening it up today I get a whole host of encoding issues since this was before I knew what text-encoding was and I don’t want to change it now. The page is a pristine showcase of table layout and I have so many implicit assumptions about the browser and resolution, it really haven’t stood up to the test of time, but I still can’t help but smile when looking back at where I (and the web) came from.
Stage 2
After the school course I was inspired by actually being able to build my own web page, so I decided to try my hands on the newfangled weblog thingy that people were talking about. I installed linux on a spare Pentium 3 machine I had and installed the LAMP stack and Wordpress. I found this theme online and thought that was cool, so I just stole the design. I don’t remember if this was an actual wordpress theme that I installed or I just looked at the source code and replicated it. When I did some research, I actually found the theme still online here, so take a look if you want to.
In my humble opinion this era of web design is the best, but I am pretty sure this is just nostalgia talking =)
University era
This is another course work page, but now I had moved to first year of university. Unfortunately I could only find this base template and not the actual content, but I remember being quite happy with myself that I was able to set classes on the active page and highlight the current page using PHP. Even though I have been interested in computers since the mid-1990s, I was more into using them than programming them before I started my degree so I was quite new to the whole “programming” business until then.
This was actually my last personal web page / blog before I revisited it during covid and updated it to the current(?) theme.
Today
The theme I am using today was a covid project where I decided it was time to update my blog after listening to Troy Hunt talk about the importance of having a persona and blog online for building my career though I haven’t been especially active, so I can’t say that I managed to make anything out of it beyond the enjoyment building stuff. In 2026 I added support for dark mode, but otherwise the site has been quite static since I did that. If you toggle between light and dark mode, you can actually see that the screenshot above will toggle to the opposite of what mode the page is in otherwise.
Thank you for taking the time to read my nostalgic rambling. I have actually added a small easter egg on the page where I have reimplemented these themes with my current layout. Note that these themes are quite hacky with absolute positioning display: contents;, hard coded paddings and more to make my blog look the way the old themes looked without changing any of my markup. This means that it will probably not be accessible at all and you will notice that a lot of text is unselectable because I have been using extensively pseudo-elements with content: '...'; blocks to inject content that just isn’t in the DOM.
You can use this select box to change the layout dynamically. It is also available in the main toolbar if you hover over it or tab to it just to the left of the RSS icon.