Decem

HybridLogic turned ten at the start of this month. Ten years. One hundred and twenty months. 3673 days. Or in other words, I had just turned sixteen when I bought it, finishing school, starting sixth form, not even a paying client under my belt. I haven’t blogged much, and what I have tends to be lost when I update. Amazingly, the current WordPress site you’re reading now is five years old with (very) minor tweaks to keep it going.

The site’s changed of course. Version 2 and version 3 were powered by my own CMS. The design of v3 is still the basis of todays aesthetics, and besides the small type and rigid widths it’s held up pretty well if I do say so myself.

Some bits of the site no longer work. Microsoft killed the Xbox API I was using. Nike have repeatedly killed Nike+’s API. I let areas go untouched, it might be old but it’s not wrong data. I added responsive abilities to the site (dropping the sidebar under the content) before responsive was even a thing.

That’s one of the advantages of the “old style” of web development. I FTPd (well, SFTPd nowadays) into the server, changed a CSS file and that was that. No commits or builds or deployments. Just change it and watch to see what happens. It’s terrifying not having a revision log or not linting code before it goes out, but it’s also terrifying how dependant on build tools we’ve become.

I want to redesign, re-architect the whole thing. Focus on my projects, the main draw of traffic, things like Plex Export and Bulk Buffer. Start consuming some new APIs, get my music and movies back on the homepage.

Content is king and I have tonnes of that. From years of blog posts, to short stories and not so short stories, there are bits of this site I forget and keep finding again every few years.

I don’t think I’ll roll my own CMS again. It’s too much hassle. Likewise modern frameworks and systems iterate too quickly. If I’d built a Laravel CMS a year ago it would be obsolete today. Likewise static sites. Not taking advantage of the dynamic nature of the web is a crying shame.

So more WordPress. I’ll dust off the SLAB 2 repos, get some package love going for WP and release them as open source this time. Considering this theme is called 9 Billion & 7 after the number of attempts it took to make, I wouldn’t hold out for a refresh any time soon though.

Maybe in another ten years.