20 years of web

Regular visitors have already noticed, I've changed the template. Deciding on a Wordpress template is harder than finding a good series on NetflyHBX. I'm not kidding. And then you have to add the headaches to adapt them to what you want, even more if you don't have much idea of PHP and/or CSS.

Schema by MyThemeShop, a very light and versatile template

After three years using Independent Publisher a theme that I recommend for being minimalist, clear and light, but that hasn't been updated for too long and already gave some minor problems, I got the"Schema" template from MyThemeShop that is presented as optimized for SEO (a nonsense because SEO is not done alone) and is light loading, another big problem of Wordpress is that it is a bag that accumulates stubble and crap from plugins and other crap.

So it was time to give it a scrubbing to everything. There are a few things left, but they are small things that don't affect the functioning of the site.

The thing is that the template comes with the necessary gadgets for the basic optimization and it works quite well because it is designed for that. I bought the full version with a license for one domain and support for one year for 35 dollars. Now they have it for 59. You can find it for free, but it's not only unpleasant to pimp your work to the staff, you also run the risk that they have injected some bug into the code and the party will be much more expensive.

It is a template highly recommended by those who use it for its loading times, and it is immediately noticeable. It has an administration panel with a very poor design and usability, but with plenty of customisation options.

There is a free Lite version with some limitations compared to the paid version which is fully functional to start with, if you don't need a lot of frills.

Disclaimer. Nobody gave me anything for writing this. Mind you, the folks at MyThemeShop also have an affiliateprogram.

Two decades of web tinkering

When the year 2000 arrived, almost everyone who thought they should be on the internet had, or had had, made a website. More than twenty years have passed since I uploaded my first website. Back then, those of us lick of design and programming we were working hard with the Frontpajas and later with Dreamhuevos. In those years, the first and horrible versions of PHP-Nuke and PostNuke. These CMS, at the time marvellous and very hackable and defaceable, with which we set up powerful pages with the style of the portal of the time, were soon abandoned.

And then came the blogs, the Pagerank and the hovels where they gave them to you for free in exchange for swallowing tons of advertising billboards. As soon as they became a "fad", there was talk of the death of blogs. Until one day they died quietly, without funeral or burial, and nobody noticed. Anyone could fill half a million pages with their memories, anecdotes and stories from this period of the internet.

Cartoon of 2010

Slow death

Blogs continue to be the best and most faithful tool in the dangerous times of the flaming social networks. In a blog there is no longer any need to posture or provoke, because blogs don't burn.

Now, your stuff ends up buried under tons of bluster and on top of that a few hordes of angry people and algorithms decide how you should and shouldn't post. If you stray even a little bit, they shut down your account. Or they put you on track by forcing you to unpublish your opinion. To"eliminate" someone's opinion was normally something that was decided by a judge by virtue of a law in force and after a complaint from someone else, or ex officio if the opinion was very serious.

Here remains as a tribute and self-embarrassment this gallery of horrors as a tribute to these two amusing decades (thank goodness there are no copies in Archive prior to February 2002).

A quick look at the evolution of this blog, now with more than 4,000 entries, and its different phases within the brutalist style web architecture. Stacked tables, impossible colour combinations on pages made entirely of chopped and shoehorned images and other botches that in their time were pretty damn cool.

In the last screenshot from 2008 you'll see a bunch of little squares under the header. They were rented for 5 euros a month each, do the maths. It was inspired by the mythical web The Million Dollar Homepage. (History)

In large part, the pimps at Google, who got cocky with their monopolistic ways and began to consider it "Link Building" for "Black Hat SEO", threatening to remove the website from the search results in their racket, put the nail in the coffin for those of us who sold links.