24 May 2013
Hard work, doing a portfolio
Like, so this crazy idea comes to me, yeah? You know, this sort of feather that slaps you around the back of the head till you stand up and shout at your neighbour? Yeah, well anyway, so this idea. Well it was like, you know, aint it about time you like sorted out all those things you did everywhere and have spread around all over the place, under a sheep, behind a pillar box, in your fag packet? Yeah, sort it out like, get it right! Put it in one place, you know you want to!
I started this site about fourteen years ago; which seems complete madness, now I think about it. But I need to go back a bit further really. I bought the domain name Sanglier.org (which I no longer own, by the way) back in 1999. It wasn't the first domain I owned, but it was the first one I bought just for the hell of it. For the life of me, I cannot completely remember what I put in it. I think I tried to do a recipe site for me and my brother called "trapped in the greaseproof," but I cannot find that now. The outside of the site looked like This (Way Back Machine). By 2001 it had progressed, somewhat, and now looked like This. Well, at least it was a bit more cutting edge! And that is how it stayed till I abandoned it.
In 2003 I bought the far more sensibly entitled sanglier.co.uk. You can see it here (yep, it is on a server). It got better, though that took till 2005 when it became a blog - the New Diary of a Nobody (some of the articles will be on here somewhere at some point.) I had originally been penning them on Blogger (and they are still there, I think), but I wanted to try and put my own system together, so I did. October of the same year saw it look a lot better. Basically I created this amazing news orientated CMS. Okay, it was not amazing, but it had a proper editorial system in it (you know, where an editor can send you work back to you and tell you to do it right?) which is more than any of the new ones have!
It also included my now infamous bear sayings like "the best way to get dinner out of a bear is with a crowbar." These too I need to rescue for this new site (another thing on the todo list). By 2007, PHP, the scripting language that I had used to write the news system, had moved on, and my clever programme no longer worked on commercial servers. Being that I built it by copying and pasting stuff I did not have the skill to update it. I exported the articles, and shot it. For the next few years the site jumped between different CMS system untill I got attacked by some supporters of the Tobacco Industry propaganda organisation "Forest" for daring to suggest that the smoking ban and giving up cigarettes was a good thing - something I did 10 years ago now.
Then, two years ago, I decided to turn it into this site. Except, it has kind of messed around quite a lot. I am not sure why it has taken me so long, it really is not that hard to do. But then again, I have a way of making "not hard" into "terribly complicated" until it reached the near impossible. I think I have it under control now, or at least, I know how to control it. The main thing to do is to fill it with stuff and work out at which point it would like to fall over and die.
One way or another, it is really hard. There is a bit of me that would like to go back to the late nineties, using Corel Web Master Suite (which I still have somewhere) and get that first site sorted out properly. If I had done that then, maybe I would have got this all out of my system and I would not be staying up to 2am now to sort this damned thing out!