09
Jul
SgBlogging… then and now
It’s been 3 years since I took the plunge and paid for my very own web hosting. SgBlogging came live on DreamHost in 2006, during a spate of outages after Google bought over Blogger. My blog, which was hosted on Blogger, went down ridiculously often, so I decided to go professional on my web hosting, and at the same time learn about hosting itself.
At that time, I was still serving out the last few months of my National Service, so the migration came one Sunday morning, after reading 30-40 articles on hosting a website. It was hard for me, because concepts like FTP and file permissions were foreign concepts to me. Thankfully, DreamHost has a really simple installer that sets up everything nicely for me, no messing around with the database or script files; with that, SgBlogging in its first incarnation on WordPress appeared.
No pictures, because I was obsessed over the many “what-if”s.
What if the user is using a browser with images turned off?
What if the user is using a browser that can’t run Javascript?
What if the user can’t see the videos?
What if I stop worry about all the what-ifs?
Well, despite its boring outlook, I enjoyed using the theme a lot. The fonts and overall colour scheme mesh well together, so it didn’t violate the sanity of anyone who was reading the posts.
But I wanted to take things further, which of course led to the crazy 2-day site re-design I did in 2007. That was barely half a year into my return to school. Even though I was a total noob when it comes to creating themes for WordPress, the burgeoning number of articles about that topic alone was enough reference for me! Whatever problems I ran into, somebody else had already asked that question somewhere. All it took was a Google search to retrieve the answer.
The end result of those 2 days of frenzied hard work is this:
The theme looks quite modern (by 2007 standards anyway), but I ended up with only a few graphic files in the theme folder. Even up till now, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a compliment or a curse; but I was happy to have written a WordPress theme right from scratch. I learned a lot from that experience, of which the top-most take-away had been:
Never to do a 2-day frenzied coding spree right in the middle of the assignment crunch period.
But I managed to get it done anyway, so I’m pretty happy with what I’d done.
And so, the site has always remained this way, even through its first migration to SliceHost in 2008, and then to Linode in 2009. No change to the theme at all. Today, I don’t really have an urge to change the theme immediately, but the thought has flashed across my mind, like the tempting little devil that it has always been.
Right in the middle of my final year project. Now, the question is, should I succumb to that pressure?