A New Site

I periodically decide to rewrite syfaro.net in some different language or framework in an attempt to make it easier to manage or update. It generally has always served the same purpose though, a homepage for my contact information or projects. In an attempt to add interesting content to this blog and keep in theme of talking about this site, let us take a look through what the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has to say about the previous versions of my site.

The Minecraft Phase

The domain was originally purchased March 22nd, 2012 and the first time it was archived was May 1st, 2012. I must have still been figuring out how WordPress worked because there was no content on the site at that time. For a while, I was very interested in Minecraft. The first versions of my site all show this. Content first showed up on June 21st. It appears the site also got a software upgrade to something custom written in PHP. Most of the content appears to have been relatively short tutorials on simple things or miscellaneous programming projects I had been working on which were mostly Minecraft themed.

The next version of the site from September 14th appears to be a more complete archive with a lot more content. It went back to being a WordPress based site that imported the previous posts. It also contains the first reference to a furry-related project — a bot to mirror posts from e621 to imgur on /r/yiff (I wouldn’t turn 18 for another 3 years, but let’s ignore that). It had a project for my boy scout troop, a generator for a duty roster so no one could complain about unfair job assignments. I remember this being the first project I worked on that had operational logic besides just CRUD. I also talked a project entitled ‘Ghast World,’ something related to Minecraft, but I can’t recall what it was supposed to be. The Twitter account for it is still active. There was even another Minecraft related project I had talked about on the site. It was a forum for modders to ask for help or post tutorials. Unfortunately the original owner of the site became less and less active until it quietly went away.

The Internet Archive seems to be having issues with the two archives from July 2013, so I’ll have to skip those.

Early Furry

The first distinctly furry site I had appeared on January 6th, 2014, an Angular-based single page website primarily showing a photo of a wolf. It had references to a blog running on the domain nyw.li. This domain has been defunct for many years now and is not archived at all. There was a Piwik tracking script using the domain vryn.in, again long since defunct and without archives.

On December 18th, the site was reduced to almost no content at all. It was the same wolf picture as on the previous site except running on syfaro.net:3 instead of port 80. The next archive was April 1st, 2015 and just a redirect to syfaro.net:3. Without an archive, I assume it was still the same site.

The Modern Version

On January 10th, 2016, the archive shows I designed the first version of the same style I’m using now. It was just a profile picture, dark blue background, and contact links. By October 31st, I had switched to the modern color scheme I’m still currently using. This is also the first version that has my character reference page and shows off all the artwork I have commissioned.

There are a number of archives from 2017 with minimal differences. The only changes were updating contact links on the homepage or adding new details and artwork to my character page. On February 8th, 2018 I added information about my projects to the homepage. September 2nd shows the very short lived Python rewrite with a Ghost powered blog.

And now here we are, October 7th, with a new version written using Hugo.

The Future

I’m sure this site will continue to get updates and rewrites as time goes on and technology and my interests change. Using a static site generator like Hugo and hosting it on Netlify seems like an excellent solution. It requires minimal intervention once set up and Hugo seems to support doing everything I want to do almost exactly how I want to do it. I will be curious to find out how long my current blog posts live and what the site will be like next year.