Design History of the Keks Blog

A lot changes in five and a half years… and a lot stays the same.

Take this blog for example.


2001-2002

Blogware:
Original URL:kex.netsol.net.au/weblog
Site/Design Status: Dormant1
First Post: 1st of January, 2001
Last Post: 11th of February, 20021
Comment: Despite using Blogger, I opted to utilise the webspace provided instead of going for the blogspot option, though, I’m not all that sure that blogspot was an option back then, not a fully integrated and viable one at least. Whilt it served it’s purpose, Blogger was too slow and limited in it’s feature (back then) and I transfered my attention to a more powerful blogware package.


The period between February and July of 2002 saw a couple of different headers and minor tweaks to a default MovableType template… I consider those days as being “the days of no fixed design“… hell, the site was even renamed (temporarily) in this period… crazy!


2002-2003

Blogware:
Original URL:
kex.netsol.net.au/mt
Site/Design Status: Extinct2
First Post: 14th of July, 2002
Last Post: 23rd of May, 2003
Comment: This was inspired by the goalkeeping uniform worm by Rustu Recber3 during Turkey’s 2002 World Cup campaign. While I quite liked to design, the use of tables simply didn’t cut the mustard when CSS really took off… and CSS was a few years away from the round corners capability required to recreate the design… this was a design before its time.


2003-2004

Blogware:
Original URL:
kekoc.com/mt
Site/Design Status: Extinct/Mothballed4
First Post: 23rd of May, 2003
Last Post: 20th of October, 2004
Comment: This design was my first attempt to design a fully W3C compliant weblog. Initially successful, complaince wasn’t long lived as more an more breaches were posted with each quiz and test code published. This designs demise came with the complete collapse of MovableType with the overload of comment spam which grew to epedemic proportions by mid 2004.


2004-2006

Blogware:
Original URL:
kekoc.com/wp
Site/Design Status: Active/Retired
First Post: 4th of December, 2004
Last Post: 31st of May, 2006
Comment: This design was a slight modification of the Kubrick theme, which at the the time was reasonably popular in the WordPress community but nowhere nearly as overused as it became when it was adopted by WordPress as part of the default installation. Despite almost every man and his dog using it after that point, I continued using this until May of 20065.


So… as you can see… a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t.

  1. I’m still able to post to it as it’s still active, however I have no plans to do so[][]
  2. I did temporarily resurrect it to get the screen capture[]
  3. An image of which is not easy to find[]
  4. It’s still exists as an archive, but it not functional as a blog[]
  5. The current design isn’t mentioned here as it is only a temporary design as is considered in the same way as the designs used in the Feb-Jul 2002 period. If however, a new design isn’t implemented before October 2006, it will be included here[]