When I was a kid, way back in the early ’80s, a local radio station — Q101, in Harrisonburg, Virginia — used to have “Hot Wax Weekends.” They’d pull music out of the vault and turn back the clocks. It was on a Hot Wax Weekend that I discovered Creedence Clearwater Revival. I first heard the Stones and the Doors on a Hot Wax Weekend.<\/p>\n
I bring up the trip down nostalgia lane because about a month ago I found, while cleaning up a directory of junk on my hard drive, some of the files for the original<\/b> look of this website.<\/p>\n
A trip down memory lane. I registered the domain for allyngibson.com<\/a> back on June 16, 2002, and the website ran on a blogging platform called Greymatter<\/a>. (Does anyone even use<\/i> Greymatter anymore? It got me started, but damn was it a pain in the ass to use.) The first post was made on June 17th<\/a>.<\/p>\n The design I put together was cobbled together. The one thing I am not<\/i> is any sort of visual designer, and I relied a great deal then on the use of WYSIWIG HTML editors. The one I used was HotDog PageWiz<\/a>, and I took one of the pre-rendered templates, figured out where to put Greymatter’s tags, and ran with that. I made some modifications — I especially liked the font, Frutiger Linotype, which came with the Microsoft Reader eBook platform, so I made sure to encode that into the design. It was all done in tables, and I understood HTML tables, so all was good. Well, maybe not good<\/i>. But it was<\/i> workable. And at the time, that was all I needed.<\/p>\n Eventually, I tired of Greymatter. It was a clunky, kludgey system, and while it worked, it was a pain to fire up and write. Hence, blogging in those early days was rare and infrequent. And when James Bow<\/a> wrote on his blog<\/a> that he was upgrading to a new version of Moveable Type, but that he kept hearing about this other<\/i> blogging package, WordPress, that was the impetus I needed to change. (Of course, it took me a couple of months, and I’m not entirely sure that was the post I was thinking of, as there’s two and a half months between James’ post and my leap, but it’s close enough for the historical record.)<\/p>\n The problem was… I didn’t know<\/i> WordPress. I migrated to WordPress<\/a>, and had no idea what to do. I certainly had no idea how to bring my Greymatter design over; WordPress worked on CSS, and I didn’t know CSS. Thus began my journey into the world of WordPress templates, where I would try out a design for a few months, and then try out something else. (When WordPress 1.5 came onto the market, with its easy theme changing abilities, it became ridiculously<\/i> easy to change themes around.) There was a Mars design that I liked, but didn’t quite<\/i> look good with WP 1.5. I especially liked one template called “Old Train.” Good times were had.<\/p>\n So when I found these old files, I began to wonder.<\/p>\n My CSS, HTML, and PHP skills have improved over the years. Could I take this table design and make it work within WordPress?<\/p>\n And what I quickly realized was that there was no reason it wouldn’t work. Indeed, there was no reason it wouldn’t have worked four years ago. I just didn’t think the problem through. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n I spent about an hour putting together the files.<\/p>\n And now you, readers new and old, can see how allyngibson.com<\/a> looked for the first two years of its existence. It’s not exact<\/i>; there are one or two minor details that are off. (In the original design, in places I used black text on the green background, for no good reason that I can figure. And the Archives<\/a> page looks not one bit like it did years ago.) It’s all still done with tables, but the styling definitions are all coded into CSS (as WordPress demands a style.css file).<\/p>\n It’s strange for me to look at, because it really does<\/i> take me back. I find myself having a goofy grin looking at the screen.<\/p>\n You, on the other hand, are probably thinking to yourself — this looks so<\/i> 1998. And you’re really not<\/i> that far wrong.<\/p>\n So, it’s a Retro Weekend at allyngibson.com. I’ve got Creedence in the stereo. The clock’s been rolled back. Party like it’s, well, a couple of years ago! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a kid, way back in the early ’80s, a local radio station — Q101, in Harrisonburg, Virginia — used to have “Hot Wax Weekends.” They’d pull music out of the vault and turn back the clocks. It was on a Hot Wax Weekend that I discovered Creedence Clearwater Revival. I first heardContinue reading “On a Retro Weekend”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4095],"tags":[351,4096],"class_list":["post-1944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-meta","tag-wordpress","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}