I started this blog half a decade ago on a custom-made CMS before shifting over to GitHub Pages and Jekyll. There has been a pretty consistent decline in posts on here since 2022 - between life and work, I just haven’t found a reason to post here. I’ve been putting a lot of my free time into rewriting GameTrakr from scratch since November 2024, and I’m finally nearing a point that I feel comfortable enough to release it so unless project creep kicks in again it should hopefully be out by the end of 2025. But that’s not what this post is about, this post is about this website which I’ve just re-designed again for the fourth time in 5 years. I wanted to pay a bit of homage to the previous versions of this site as other than the existing one which has just been overwritten, I can’t remember what any of them looked like (thanks Source Control <3)
Version 0.0
This is the earliest working version of this website I can find after the migration to GitHub Pages. The commit is dated 2020-07-07 which was 6 days before I finished ver 1. The project and blog layout hasn’t even been started yet, and the FontAwesome icons that should be at the bottom of the page with social links are in-place but the CSS isn’t there at all.
For some reason I have a transition at the html tag level which means every page you click on has a fade in effect. It’s actually horrendous, no idea why half-a-decade ago me thought that was a nice idea.
Version 1.5
I shipped a semi-redesign of the initial version 2021-09-03, just over a year after version 1. It’s still very similar to the initial version shown above, but you can really see where it was starting to take shape and probably why I hated it so much. More detail on that is outlined on the blog post redesign v2. It also contains more screenshots of what this version looked like before I redesigned it for v2, including the pinned post feature and the blog and project pages.
Version 2.0
2022-01-23 @ 04:16 I shipped version 2.0 which did include quite a lot of improvements over the previous. Light and Dark Mode was based on your system settings, projects were a bit more polished but still not great, post categorization, full-width nav, an actual working about me page and this was the version the blog posts per year was introduced.
Version 2.5
2023-06-08 @ 17:19 I shipped what I called version 3.0 in my GitHub history, but really, it’s Version 2.5. It’s what the current website is and was minor improvements to things I hated in version 2.0. It was primarily background work as with versions before 2.0 I was using Jekyll completely wrong as I just kind of yolo’d it during the setup and it was finally starting to bite me in the ass. I also made some visual enhancements. The navbar was changed to not be full width unless you were on a mobile, projects were added to the homepage and I finally stopped using SF-Pro as the font.
Version 3.0
Today I’m releasing version 3.0. It’s a complete rewrite of my entire site, down to the liqud syntax in my existing posts (that wasn’t fun updating that) and all projects have now been padded out with actual information, download links, language notes etc. version the previous version which was either ‘View’ or ‘Download’ on a very crappy summary of what it did. It’s not completely finished and there are a few improvements I want to make, but I’m happy enough with where it is at the moment to release it.
cya later sexys