this is the code for my personal website https://henrik.siljebrat.se
it's the first time in years that i've written all the code for a website from scratch. all these new css things with responsive design and media queries scared me off so for my blog and other sites i've depended on themes made by others and then customizing them a bit. but thanks to coming across a great summary/overview by Tania Rascia i was inspired! and this is the result.
i used to create and run websites in the late '90s and early '00s but back then css was really new and we did silly things like designing with <table> and 1x1px images to align elements properly. early css allowed us to style the table borders to align things. yes it was the stone age.
curious what i used to do? mostly it was video game fansites. one of the more interesting ones was "the games comparison archive" where i wrote articles comparing games in the same genre and collected and normalised review scores from game review sites. unfortunately wayback machine doesn't have a snapshot (the site didn't last long) and weirdly redirects to some other archive but i'm 99% sure this was the url: https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://gamesarchive.etmnet.com/
too bad i didn't continue, i heard metacritic was fairly successful.
anyway, the coolest thing i did was probably a swedish fansite for warcraft3. i started it in may 1998, 1.5 years before warcraft 3 had even been announced. the first version was just a wishlist for what i wanted warcraft 3 to be. at some point random people started emailing me their wishlists so i put those up as well. i started posting news, which was mostly about new/updated wishlists and what happened on other warcraft fansites. (there were other nerds like me, also waiting for warcraft 3!)
at some point i figured all these nerds sending me wishlists might want to talk to each other, so i learned php to create a forum. the site grew and i got people to help me out running it. (if you, dear reader, happen to be one of them please get in touch! it's been too long :)
i redesigned the site two billion times. the oldest version i can find on wayback machine is one from april 1999, five months before warcraft 3 was announced (september 1999): https://web.archive.org/web/19990429203234/http://war3se.etmnet.com/
here's what it looked like in 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010401014756/http://www.war3se.com/
somewhere around when world of warcraft was announced, me and the fine people of diabloii.nu, a swedish fansite for the diablo games, got together and created warcraft.nu. it was likely sweden's biggest warcraft fansite at some point.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040924154417/http://www.warcraft.nu/
i lost interest around..2005? 2006? i can't remember, but the others kept the site going for years after.
looking back at it now, i cringe at some of the things teenager me wrote (not to mention my nickname, i'm dying). but mostly it's fine. sometimes even funny. and now i realise this was 20 years ago. i suddenly feel old. man, the interwebs used to be such a cool place before it became cable tv. ;P
if you're wondering about the .nu domain it was commonly used among swedes because "nu" means "now" in swedish (and in a few other languages). also, if i remember correctly, it was difficult to get a .se domain name as an individual back then so .nu was the way to go. apparently the country Niue sued sweden's internet foundation in 2018 for taking control over the domain name: https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/pacific-news-minute-niue-sues-swedish-company-markets-its-domain-name-nu
awkward!