Every now and then I ask myself why I would put so much time and effort into maintaining this website and keeping it online. I make no money from it, in fact, it does cost money to have my own web domain name, private e-mail and self-hosting to keep it online.
On the off-chance that maybe one person will come across it from a web search and appreciate it.
In reality there are probably just myself and a million web crawling bots that read it from the front page. Maybe 3 people read it via RSS. So why?
Simply because I have already put so much time and effort into it.
It is a gentle madness to do so. Sheer hubris. Fuckery, even.
But this place is mine, all mine.
Everything was coded and built with love. As the technology advances so does the opportunity to learn new coding skills, programming languages, animated icons and wireframe layouts.
With the help of an LLM, I was able to find the missing articles from 2023 and 2024. I had them backed up thankfully, but they did not import or migrate into this latest build. That has been corrected. I also had the LLM scour the Internet Archives to find and convert all of my old posts from 2006 to 2001 chrisdenbow.com. I also had it search another old website of mine: mojodenbow.com as well as photomojo.com. 316 posts discovered and recovered! I then converted them into an .xml file where I they imported flawlessly into my website database. Only the images attached to those posts could not be pulled in, just the text. I’ll take it!
New features learned and added for this Footnotes theme include:
- Light/dark mode toggle button at the top
- Redesigned alphabetical menu with nested pages, teal hover highlights, and optional click sounds.
- Keyword search across article titles, excerpts, content, categories, and tags.
- Homepage with four article previews and “Read more” links.
- Curated Photo section with randomized images on page load.
- Grid Photos controls for adding, replacing, and hiding gallery images.
- Photo gallery pagination and lightbox viewing.
- Animated cassette audio player with spinning reels, waveform, seeking, playback speed, and downloads.
- Hidden rabbits
- Animated film projector beside a proportional widescreen video player.
- Media hub with Audio, Photo, and Video subpages.
- Footnotes entries supporting text, photos, and coordinates.
- Pedestrian icon with looping ground animation.
- Library cover art automatically displayed alongside reading entries.
- Grayscale “Currently reading” sidebar widget.
- Marginalia sidebar widget.
- “On This Day” sidebar showing up to three articles, with an archive fallback.
- Archives category cloud with consistent teal category icons.
- Styled year/month archive selector.
- Teal text highlighting and handwritten margin notes
- Clearer previous/next article navigation and Back to Archives control.
- Back-to-top button.
This is my website, my home on the WWW. I’ve invested decades into it. I am missing articles from 2000 to 2006 but I will keep excavating my archives to find and import them. When I am done with that I will clean up all of the old, irrelevant tags and categories. Next steps beyond that will be to find and insert all of the article’s images I used.
Finally at the end of this post, I’ll take you back to the beginning. The LLM was able to dig up from the Internet Archives, my absolute very first website post. Click if you’d like to see it!
