website

Back In Time

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With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.

The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.

I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.

The WayBack Machine

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Have you heard about the Internet Archive? I have but somehow always forget that it is available. It is a library of books, software, music, websites and more. A perfect blend of old and new knowledge. This is truly a national treasure.

Did I mention websites? It’s true- the WayBack Machine deploys spiders across the world wide web to take snapshots of websites. They send them out everywhere and my old websites were caught at least two times a month. This is how I discovered a problem with my own personal archives.

There are missing records.

I verified this when I searched the Archives Page on my own site. From September 2013 until November 2017, FOUR YEARS of my writing cannot be found.

Screenshot of this site way back in 2014. None of that is on my site currently. Aargh!

I did a cursory search on one of my hard drives just for the year 2015 that turned up 37,000 results, none of them were my writings. I’ll need to check the rest but for now I am bummed. No idea what happened but hope I can find them, post them, back them up online and in print.

HTML

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I am in a mood again. Thinking about keeping this website online as a private online archive while at the same time, writing to the journal inside my own offline database.

If I do take this private, it’ll be a stripped down HTML-only version.

Stay tuned.

Reset

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Sure, the domain name is the same but the platform and the design are all new. The previous Ghost server was very proprietary and will not allow an easy way to export all of my writings there. Nor would it allow me to import decades worth of work into it. So, it had to go away even though I am taking a lo$$ on it. Because why write there when I cannot export?

I have imported the archives here from the previous years but not all of it. I still need to cut/paste from the former platform onto here. Grr.

This site design is a fresh, minimal look and inspired by the Mercedes F1 team colors.

This website is not complete and it will take a few days for everything to be up to my standards.

In the meantime, welcome! Have a look around. Let me know what you think in the comments after each post or from the “About” page.

Why

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Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.

Why?

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Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.

Photo Archive Site

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This new website has been designated as a repository for a small set of images to be stored online instead of an expensive third-party photo hosting site (see ya, Flickr!). The actual photo archives are numbered to almost 50,000 images, so only a select few are chosen to be represented on this site. While you are there, take a look around inside the archives!

This is an extension to my main portfolio website that can be clicked here or in the nav bar up top.

I have not yet begun to upload images to this photo archive site and will do so throughout the next week. Okay, maybe one or two of my favorite subject:

ugh

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Parsing an exported .json file into something readable like a plain .txt format is proving troublesome. These are old posts that need to be translated and then migrated over to the Archives site since they were not imported due to these .json errors.

Unfortunately, there has been no easy solution. It is all copy/paste and manually removing the gratuitous code, then format it properly and then copy/paste and date manually into the Archives.

ugh
argh
Success.

Microblogging

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Microblogging is a combination of blogging and instant messaging that allows users to create short messages to be posted and shared with an audience online. Social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have become extremely popular forms of this type of blogging. These short messages can come in a variety of content formats including text, images, video, audio, and hyperlinks.

Formerly known as a “Quickie” tag here, I’ve re-assigned a “Micro” tag to every microblogging post I published. Again, think Twitter but without the algorithm and adverts. If you only want to see these quick snippets then, I have generated a “Micro” page at the top of this website. Or, click on the two lines in the upper right hand corner on your mobile. This will display a collection of Micro posts to date.

TinkerFutzNPutz

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Over the past few weeks, I have retired the silver fox website and migrated everything over from the last 23(!) years to an Archived website for posterity. I purchased a new domain name (chrisdenbow.website) that matches my own because I had allowed someone else to snatch up the old one (R.I.P. chrisdenbow.website). If you type in the old web address, it will redirect into an Icelandic online betting site. The internet is weird.

Moving on, I built this website here from the ground up. I took some old code, improved it, streamlined that code and made it sexier. It’s just like baking a cake but in this regard, you can add or take out the ingredients in whichever way or order to what makes sense to you. I then uploaded all to my test server, broke it, rewrote and tried again. Success. Then everything was migrated to the Ghost server, imported a few old posts to help get it going, and pushed send. ChrisDenbow.website was born.

After all that futz, it was time to putz:

  1. Putzed away at retiring the FoxCast and added the Radio Denbow podcast instead.
  2. Created an e-mail inbox only newsletter because that is how some prefer to keep updated.
  3. Created and hid an Easter egg somewhere on this site.
  4. Built in a “Quickies” page for interstitial journaling
  5. Etc., etc., etc.
  6. Keep tweaking and updating this site obsessively

Now I think I stop the futzing and putzing after these past few weeks and enjoy.

For the past twenty+ years, I have bounced in/out of different platforms and formats, tried my hand at coding and designing something that made me happy. Because if you are going to invest decades into something you enjoy, it damn well needs a decent platform to showcase it. Those decades were all a learning experience, and it brought me here.

All that to say that this website will be my own small slice of the WWW for a long time.

It’s about time.

DVD Archives

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A long time ago I created a website for my daughter to document her growth. Over time, though, it was neglected and shelved. I came across an .xml file containing a few posts but not all of them so I built a new website archive, added some images from the photo archives that didn’t migrate over and boom, it’s back.

I regret not keeping up with this among all of the other regrets.

So for now, her early works are back and hopefully in the future we can build a proper, modern telling of her beautiful story.

DVD – Daphne’s Archives
DVD Daphne’s Archiveschrisdenbow