IN JUNE 2022 I DECIDED TO REBUILD my personal webpage, but when I got to work I saw my old webpages were broken! In August 2006, the summer after graduating high school before college, I wrote a Dvorak touch typing tutor in Flash. I learned in 2022 Flash is completely dead; being a sentimental person I decided to take a few days to re-write it in Javascript and added some cool features while I was at it.

Next I looked at this old mandatory blog I wrote in college while overseas in Croatia, and found out that it was also broken! 2008 versions of MySQL and Wordpress were failing: limited comment security lead to thousands of comments and the layout wasn't loading at all. I'm a sentimental guy so I figured I'd take a few days to restore it.

I used Archive.org to rebuild the original faithfully. but it looked pretty dated, especially with the raster/bitmap text in the header.

These are the things I changed:

• Content changes in text:
  • Prelude/Afterward entries are added in 2022
  • Addendum boxes- additional information and corrections added to some posts, in specially marked and dated "addendum boxes"
  • Post on June 20, 2008 - deleted duplicate photo/caption with caption 'Food between Mostar and Sarajevo'
  • Besides for those differences, all text is exactly the same as original blog.
• Changes in photographs:
  • Almost all photos are larger and higher resolution with slightly better color.
  • Post on April 4, 2008 - Signficantly improved colors on 1 photo with caption: 'An HDR shot of an old lady I found walking down this really interesting road by the salt mine in Ston'. Click images to see originals.
  • Post on May 8, 2008 - Signficantly improved colors on 3 photos with captions: 'HDR shot I took without my tripod', 'River outside the salt mine in stone' and 'Road leading to the salt mine'. Click images to see originals.
  • All other photographs are identical to 2008 blog.
• Blog entries order reversed, reads from beginning to end.
• Spam comments and tags removed.
• Some dead links now point to Archive.org, GregK's link in About page updated to working blog link from around the same time period
• Host photos on local server instead of from Flickr, in case Flickr disappears one day.
• Blog is now a simple static HTML page, rather than a Wordpress website. 2008 versions of Wordpress, PHP and MySQL are no longer supported, and a 2022 Wordpress will have the same issue again someday, but static HTML and CSS should require no future maintance.
• Font of entire blog now Vollkorn. Font for whole blog is larger than original.
• Links are now green because I liked the way it looks better
• Changed title of original 'Preface' to "Introduction"
• Wrote different CSS for mobile, so this page works better on mobile now (way overkill)
• Header updated to look modern on high resolution displays:
  • Found Vollkorn font, which resembles original font in bitmap header text, and embedded it.
  • Replaced original bitmap title, random text and header links with Vollkorn text in 2022 version.
  • Found Floralia font, whose symbols matches decorations in original header very closely. I used this font to create a new 300dpi version of the decoration, which should look sharp for the foreseeable future.
  • Added links for Stacy and Ian, something I've been meaning to do since I was in Croatia.
  • Got rid of archive (useless Wordpress artifact) and renamed Photo link
  • Added a link to this page

Mouse over or tap the image below to compare the original 2008 header with the 2022 header.