Ten years of Punaro.com

June 11th marked the 10th anniversary of Punaro.com. In actuality, this site has existed since my freshman year at RIT in 1995. The web was brand new at that point, and my roommate geeks and I were competing to see who could have the coolest website. It was a smorgasbord of repeating image backgrounds, animated gifs, and horizontal rules being guarded by Lemmings. Luckily for all of us, no evidence of that site exists anymore.

The second version of my site was a lesson in trying to build cross-browser compatibility using frames. Over 10 years later, that’s still a pain in the ass.

By Version 3 I had built my own content management platform with CGI scripts and server-side includes. I was also doing nearly what we term today as “blogging”, although I didn’t keep a historical record. When you came to the site, you’d see whatever it was that was up there at the moment. It would likely be replaced by something else the next time you showed up. It was the antithesis of LiveJoural, where everything was saved. Ick. Who would want that?

I created a 4th version in 2003 when Amanda and I got married so we could share the site. That was the last version to operate on my homegrown CMS, as I jumped to WordPress in 2005.

So, after 4 years on WordPress, I’m starting to work on implementing a new theme. Actually, I started this a few months ago and just haven’t found much time lately, so in all honesty, it will likely be fall before anything new gets rolled out. I still do most of my HTML in a text editor, so even editing a pre-existing theme can take a bit of time.

It’s been a fun project to work on for all these years, and even though I don’t post here as often as I would like, I will probably always have a site up at Punaro.com. It just becomes a part of you after so long.