TL;DR: the previous version of my website is archived here.
For reference, for the record, and for future digital archaeologists, the previous version of my website can be excavated and browsed from the Internet Archive, here.
The last version of my website was first deployed in 2009. It was powered by BlogMaster, the bespoke open-source blogging engine I developed that same year, complete with functionality for blog posts, comments and all managed through a CMS. My BlogMaster blog engine was implemented using ASP.NET MVC 1.0 for the UI, with Entity Framework 1.0 as the ORM and a SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 database. I’d been playing with ASP.NET MVC and EF since both were in beta. If I started the project today, it would be serverless, Infrastructure as Code, and hosted in the cloud, either AWS or Azure. For expediency, for now I’ll just use Software as Service, instead, and you’re looking at the result.
To put the launch of my previous website into historical context, Twitter was launched two years earlier in 2006 and had begun to enter mainstream usage around 2008, indeed I created my first “official” (non-anonymous) Twitter account in 2009. The design of my 2009 website was loosely inspired by Twitter’s design at that time, and naturally adopted the trendy buzzword web standards of the day, HTML5 and CSS3.
Although I was still sometimes adding new posts to my blog just for old-times sake, with many other side-projects on the go, ranging from my growing real estate empire to other technology projects, I just didn’t have the time my old blog deserved to be maintained and brought up to date. By 2010 my time was increasingly consumed with work, family and other side-projects that made money, including two websites that I’ve already sold for a substantial profit. My son was born in 2010, aged 12 and flourishing at secondary-school at the time of writing this, so the website is a about year older than him!
I’ve had to accept that the 2009 version of my website existed only for sentimental value. The design and the client-side code had fallen far behind current trends. Frankly, the website had become an embarrassment! Surprisingly, that ancient legacy website still enjoyed a healthy flow of traffic, not least because of some of my oldest open-source projects that are still widely used, such as my ASPTwitter library which used Classic ASP’s legacy JavaScript stack (JavaScript on the server-side “before it was cool”) to provide an excellent Twitter API client that still runs nicely today on any Microsoft/IIS web server.
I might resurrect a very small selection of worthy blog posts from the old version of this website under the tag, “archive“…
It was a difficult decision to decommission the old website, but the time was right, and I dedicate this page to its memory, the final epitaph for a 2009 web app that I’ve enjoyed using for over a decade, posting random stuff ranging from videos of my son growing up to photos of my crazy adventures. The Internet has changed. The world has changed. Technology has changed. I have changed. My website must change. Goodbye, old friend; you served me well. You are gone, but never forgotten.