I did some minor facelift work to the home page – check out https://rumored.com if you get a chance. Nothing too exciting, but I wanted to mess with JQuery a little bit, and I’m now using it for rounded corners and hover effects. The old circa-2007 DHTML stuff I was using for panel swapping was fun, but I’m convinced that the method of having the panel text embedded within the JavaScript was causing crawler issues. I’m slightly worried that the new caffeine engine of Google’s is bombing out on page errors, and I think the old embedded HTML in JavaScript crap was looking like one big error.
The new page is not as exciting, and I am convinced I need to do something better, but I don’t have time to sink into some gigantic mess of flash and photoshop wizardry. I really just want to work on narrowing down and focusing what I have on the site, which is why a lot of stuff is now gone. But I like what I have. Or at least I like what I have as seen in Safari 5 on a Mac. I’m always worried that a copy of IE 2 for Solaris will turn the whole thing into an unholy terror due to some rendering problem.
I was thinking about this, and this is maybe my fourth iteration of the root page on Rumored, and I think there were at least a couple of iterations on speakeasy from 1995-1998, a brief home on plan9.spry.com in 95, and then a couple of iterations on bronze from 1993-1995. I also had a hyplan (what we used to call homepages) back on cs.indiana.edu in 1992-1993, but it consisted of two .au files, one of Cannibal Corpse, and one of Bill Perry yelling “will you shut the fuck up?” That’s 18 years of homepages. EIGHTEEN YEARS.
The www as we know it is only 7000 days old. I’ve been here for about 6500 of them. Christ.