Everything old is new again

A couple of days ago I started to get the itch to change up the design of the site. I started messing around with new color combinations, but eventually decided that I wanted something kind of dark and grungy — maybe to match my mood lately 🤷‍♂️

Who knows, I might get sick of this in a week and go back to the purple. I guess we’ll see what happens, eh?

Anyway, as I was working on things, I remembered that one of my very old site designs would be perfect, so I dug up the old WordPress theme, copied a couple of images over, and updated the colors to have better contrast — and poof — here we are.

Some details you likely don’t care about

I originally built and designed this theme for WordPress back in December 2009 when I was home for a month after my dad passed away. I needed something to occupy my time, and what a better way to do it than by building a theme that looked like the rotting inside of a dumpster 😂

Interestingly enough, I noticed as I was poking around yesterday that I actually launched that new site design 16 years ago today, so I figured why not relaunch it on its anniversary. Here’s a screenshot of the post from 16 years ago announcing the redesign:

Note: Both of the screenshots below are from the Internet Archive and were captured later in 2010, which is why the announce post isn’t in the ‘Recently’ list.

And here’s a screenshot of the about page:

Same shitshow, different decade

Bringing this design back isn’t just about nostalgia. I actually like it, it still works, and it fits where my head’s at right now. The code is better, the colors actually have contrast, and I’m not fighting with WordPress anymore — but the instinct to rip things apart and rebuild them hasn’t really changed.

Welcome (back) to the shitshow. Buckle up!