So, what happened to 2008?

Mar 3, 2009

You may have been wondering, especially after looking at the blog post archive, why I made no posts in all of 2008. Was 2008 a missing year? Did nothing happen in my life?

Well, yes and no. In December of 2005 I discontinued development of the old Orca Blog script, which had been running my blog for two years before. Even though development was discontinued, I kept using the script as my personal blogging tool. As the months pressed on though, the limitations of the script began to grate at me until the end of 2007 when I made my last post here. The convenience of posting using other blogging systems, and in various forums, had spoiled me; it became just too much of a hassle, both in time spent and psychologically, to keep using the Orca Blog.

During 2008, I procrastinated fixing up the blog script and debated whether or not to delete it entirely and switch to using my third-party blog, The Roost, at my.opera.com. In fact, I actually made nine posts there during 2008, not far off the average number I used to make in my blog at GreyWyvern.com.

1. Alphanum: Javascript Natural Sorting Algorithm
2. How to copy arrays and objects in Javascript
3. Drag and Drop on a Shoestring
4. Ajax - There's nothing to it!
5. Coming soon... PlanetWerks 2.2
6. PlanetWerks performance tweaks
7. Guys, I am telling you... Dragonland is the best band ever! Srsly!
8. PlanetWerks 2.2 is released!
9. Live Business Web Design: a new panic domain registration scam[/URL]

Note: I have since moved all those posts over to this blog.

So it's not like I wasn't posting actively. At the same time though, I was getting disillusioned with my website. The blog and forum were old and insecure, the design was filled with hacks, some of which were no longer necessary given the changing browser landscape, and there were some pages on which absolutely nothing had changed in almost five years. For some reason, that last thing really bugged me

So 2008 was the year I spent waffling on the decision to either pack up my blog here and move to The Roost, or redevelop the blog into a new site design. As testament to this, a half-built file called newblog.php was sitting in my development folder for pretty much the entire year before I finally made the decision to do the redesign in February. Several things triggered this: One was that it was 2009, and the "latest" post on the blog now appeared to be two years ago rather than just last year. Another was that January of 2009 seemed to fly by (at least it did for me) and when February rolled around, I was amazed that 1/12th of a year had gone by and I hadn't seemed to have accomplished anything of importance! I'd had just about enough of the status quo for one year; it was time to make something happen.

So at least I will remember 2009 for something, even if it's only that I redesigned my website, updated most of my widgets and replaced the old blog with something of which I'm much more proud. That's my story and I'm sticking to it

Here's to 2009! I really hope it brings more events of great significance my way.

⇐ CSV String to Array in JavaScript

Exposing DOM Event Listeners in Context ⇒

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