The Green is (almost) Back

📅 Posted 2018-11-23

Over 15 years ago in 2002, I bought the domain nisch.org and commenced developing a PHP-based blog with photos and widgety things.

Looking back, it was during Uni times and we had a lot of birthday parties and general social activity (not a lot of studying was going on), which was published on my website. Features were added over time including a photo gallery, comments, “yell” box, user accounts and the like. Passwords were stored as unsalted MD5’d in the MySQL database (oh the horror!).

You could say that many lessons were learnt! In some ways, it was very similar to what I would now consider the first version of Facebook, only it was a much more restricted audience and was generally about me, my friends and my family. It was liberating having a website that I had so much control over and could be used to explore new development ideas and functions.

More recently I caught up with some friends from Uni and they were amazed I still had a website and still wrote blogs. They were however disappointed that my site was no longer that familiar shade of green.

I’m debating whether I bring back the good old green nisch.org theme, from some time 2003. It’s a bit like having a 15 year comeback tour, but for a website template.

The world has moved on quite a lot from the days when the original theme was crafted and would require some effort to bring it into the modern age. Some things come to mind:

Divs would have to replace tables.
Bootstrap could make it responsive (although actually the original one wasn’t too bad on mobiles, just by chance!).
Verdana is seen to be a poor man’s font.

So I thought I’d have a go at upgrading it. I have to say, the results look quite dated, but it’s a faithful homage to a time when the <table> tag ruled and could be abused to pretty much achieve anything.