Mikestreety's New Clothes

For regular readers, you will notice a fresh new face on the old dog (my first blog post that made the many migrations was from 2009!). This has been a long time coming and is a continuation of an actual theme/consistent design I'm beginning to use across all my projects.

For those interested, the site is running on Craft CMS, using Laravel Mix to compile the SCSS & JS. If you're visiting this site on an older browser, you may not see the colours, or much CSS at all in fact as I am using CSS Variables (custom properties). Looking at my analytics, I can see the visitors are mainly in Chrome/Firefox (I assume mainly developers are visiting) so I made the call to keep these in place (rather than compiling to raw hex like we do at Liquid Light) and benefit from their flexibility.

With Craft CMS you can have many "Channels", which is exactly what this Blog, the Notes and Projects (found on the homepage) are utilising. Having built Behind the Source in between the original carnation of this Craft CMS blog and this version, I learned a lot about structuring the project and templates, so I took the opportunity to backup the database and files and re-build and restructure locally, before pushing live.

A walk down memory lane

With this recent update to my site, I thought I would revisit previous CMS's and (if I can find them) reskins of my site!

• June 2010 - I started my web presence as mikestreetmedia. The site was built with static pages (except for the Wordpress powered blog) and I was trying to build up my internet reputation View June 2010 on Internet Archive
• February 2011 - mikestreetmedia didn't last long (I had the domain name for free for a year) so **mikestreety **was born (yes, I have owned the domain name for 10 years). As for the site, it was the same but got a reskin, and apparently I thought the more social networks you were on, the better. View February 2011 on Internet Archive
• September 2011 - That site didn't last long (I had a lot of time on my hands) and I reduced the site to a single page, with links to my Twitter, Skype, Email and LinkedIn. That was it. Unfortunately, the internet archive didn't cache the CSS, so the full effect of the site isn't available.
• January 2012 - Apparently, I couldn't stand not having a blog, so 4 months later, once again, my site changed. This time, I went for the "nude" site approach - blogging and posting on a naked site in a bit to force me to write some CSS for it. View January 2012 on Internet Archive
• July 2012 - It looked like I had added some colour by now, but obviously having a skinny site did nothing for encouraging working on my own site.  In 2012 I was promoted at work and spent a lot of my spare time either working on side-projects or not wanting to be looking at a computer at all. Productivity on my site dwindled. View July 2012 on Internet Archive
• February 2013 - In February 2013 I decided to remove the Wordpress site and move purely to blogging on AnchorCMS. I decided not to migrate my Wordpress posts, but instead start again. View February 2013 on Internet Archive
• July 2014 - For a year or so I stuck with AnchorCMS themes until I started looking for new job. I figured as a front-end developer I should have a site which was actually coded by me, which was when the new theme came in - View July 2014 on Internet Archive
• April 2016 - That theme stuck around for a while (although evolved somewhat), but in 2016 I changed the CMS that powered my blog to Craft. With the change to Craft I re-imported all of my old Wordpress blogs (more for prosperity then actual content as a lot were out of date). I also wanted to make my blog more personal so I added a bit of info about me and a photo on the homepage.View April 2016 on Internet Archive
• October 2017 - This was when the homepage got closer to how it is today, with my face in a circle and the short bio still there. In this version I got rid of the projects and combined the local/remote blogs posts into one list. This variation was the one that was replaced this weekend (albeit with some optimisation & performance tweaks). View October 2017 on Internet Archive