Commonplace: Site History

This was a pretty clean, blocky design. There was also a dark mode version of it, that was real easy on the eyes at night. It was a nice, but short-lived design, replaced in January, 2022.

A long-standing design, this screenshot seems to be missing the header, which had nagivation links to the prior and next blog posts. The design lived for years and was replaced in December, 2021. The blog engine was built on Sinatra using the blogging software, Scanty. Hosting provided by Heroku.

There is a design out there somewhere that lasted into 2010. I cannot for the life of me find it.

Here's where the design gets very "this is old and also bad and he's a programmer." This design survived until at least 2008. That means I left a corporate job and got a couple remote gigs all while someone presumably looked at this monstrous site. This was probably a PHP site running on DreamHost. I believe my blog was on WordPress at this point.

Honestly, I really have no idea. This is version "1.0.1" of an HTML site that I used to represent me online until at least April of 2004. I think it existed for months, not years.

This was my site in the early 2000s, lasting until the first part of 2004. I created a bulk of the site in the late 90s during college. It uses frames. I remember being so excited about the navigation, which has a bit of a 3D effect of a cylinder with a flat nav panel cut into it. I also thought people might want to read my "common man" movie reviews. I think it was hosted on Tripod? Dreamhost? That ISP hosting provider in Omaha that I found? Toward the end of this time I was blogging at Xanga.

I know I'm missing at least one design, and it was my very first one. I think it also uses frames because that was the cool technology. It was hosted at college (inst.augie.edu/~bjhess) and it featured my movie reviews. During these college years I also built a few other HTML sites: one for a friend's mom's business, one for a funeral home, and one for my high school marching band.