One month too early to say "wait a minute, one year on". Not quite the 4 years like last time but a year. This time I knew I had it kicking around and so came back to it.

I'm thinking of setting this up as a journal sort of blog, although I like writing on 1Writer on my phone and this wouldn't work that well with it. It technically could work as it's all git repos, and this takes markdown files. Just need to make sure it all builds correctly etc.

Somewhat forlorn with technology at the moment. Thinking of selling the main desktop and generally cutting back stuff. Perhaps not really worth it and I'm better off keeping the hardware. I could dismantle it all and see how I get on. Although I can't really be bothered with that.

Probably just do nothing.

Lately I've been feeling forlorn about my blogging arrangements. This is a frequent event, and I often circle between a few pieces of software, one of them is ikiwiki. This site is ikiwiki, and seems like in 2021 I got sucked into it and set up my blog and even imported all my old posts.

I found I still had it on the VPS and just pointed a domain back to it and here we are!

These are arguably terrible cars, but I want one.

I've come to find I much prefer writing in short posts, just one or two sentences at a time during the day. I like them to be grouped under a day heading rather than having a specific title. It probably falls under the category of "pointless waffle" online but strangely I like it. The best software for this, from my perspective, has been Tiddlywiki and Drummer.

It does make me wonder about normal blogs. I've got this one and I easily get sucked in to looking at hugo themes or thinking about Ghost etc. but really all that ends up happening is I waste a whole evening looking at this stuff and then remember I don't really want it.

I keep thinking of even skipping this entirely and just going all tiddlywiki.

I only have a tiny selection of my grandparent's photos but I enjoyed admiring the film gear in some of the shots. My nanna on the right and a friend on the left. This is 1961 in Kenya.

I've made a few sites over the years. The past ~10 have been mainly a blog (with virtually no content 😅) but before that I had a few other sites.

I was particularly keen at making sites around 2000, whilst I was in senior school. Going to see what I can find in the Internet Archive for screenshots but for now here's what I remember:

Romsnet

Oh so illegal...it was an emulator and roms website. I can't remember if I had a domain or not, certainly not romsnet.com. It was probably hosted on our ISPs web hosting. I don't think I actually had any roms, the whole site was just hotlinks to other roms websites but I made a big list of them all. It was super-cheesy 1999/2000 web design with banners, spinny gifs, visitor counter, and think I was playing some Final Fantasy music in the background.

I remember one day being very excited as the visitor count went from 50 odd to about 10,000, it then jumped more over the next week but then I think it stopped or the counter went weird...perhaps it went weird when it hit 10,000...

Blacklotus

I loved Magic: The Gathering at school...in fact I still like the idea of it now, but I don't want to invest 1,000s into paper. Anyway, I used to buy a few cards from some American guy who was selling his online and that gave me the idea of selling mine. It was a horrible effort to maintain a plain text/html table of all my cards to sell, but as a teenager I probably didn't have much else to do.

September 2000

Free-online was a dial up ISP who offered a free domain name with every account! I think you just had to use their dial-up number once a year to keep your account. So a 1 minute call once a year was all that was needed. So as the proud owner of www.blacklotus.co.uk, my MtG sales site was a premium business.

I remember getting an email from some company that demanded the domain as it was the name of their company. Not sure if I replied but they didn't get it...at least not initially. Once we moved to ADSL or maybe cable, I lost the account and the domain. I don't remember if I sold any cards or not. I see the domain is now for sale.

GBAUK

I loved the Gameboy Color and the new Gameboy Advance looked amazing. So much so that I made a website about it! Living at http://www.gbauk.cjb.net/ I put together a lovely purple themed site with my new found knowledge of html tables to make a "side bar". I remember making the logo and then doing a flashing star over it, not sure what I used to do it...part of me thinks macromedia software. I was also very proud of my acronym "Above any CD Game!" for Gameboy Advance.

April 2001

The site was just an excuse to use Amazon associate links. I did write a few reviews but mostly the content was just lists and links. For a while I did make some money from it..maybe £100 every other month or so, which wasn't bad!

I had a friend...well my dad's work colleague's partner...was making Gameboy Advance games and he leant me a pre-release console and games before it came out. That was pretty neat. I found the console relatively recently, think I sold it though. Bought my daughter a Gameboy DSi last year, was £15 used! She's not that interested in it and would rather play the Switch. My rose tinted glasses can't see the terrible graphics of the old DS/Gameboys. I have it sat on my desk as I'm "about to play it again".

Still living

I do want to do a history tour of my main domain, as that's had a few changes over the years. For now here are a few other sites I've made, but these ones are still going:

• dfworlds - a django powered Dwarf Fortress worlds site where people can upload world gens. My first python programming experience!
• df stories - a friend and I played a game of Dwarf Fortress and wrote up stories after each year
• I used to have a minecraft map render of our world online but that seems to have disappeared. I'd like to find the picture of our original MC world from 2010.