I’ve been working on website projects for the past four months, and I am finally done. I can rest easy until the next time the web design bug bites. Last time, I talked about finishing up my Royfuss Archives. This time, I want to talk about my web museum.
I first took a stab at this project in 2021. I wanted to take all of my old websites I designed (published and unpublished), and put them on the web server so people could browse them. Before uploading them, I wanted to polish up the code so they would at least pass W3’s HTML validator. I finished up one website, but never got around to the rest. When I was working on the Royfuss Archives project, I decided I wanted to reboot the project to showcase what my website looked like before 2012.
The first site I worked on was the main Royfuss site from 2007 through 2011. I had a copy of the site on my web server; I called it Royfuss 2010, which was the last time I updated it. The old HTML code was intact. However, the homepage returned 44 warnings and errors when ran through the validator. The page was about 100 lines, so that is not great. Also, the whole site was just one giant table, which is a design no-no. I spent a lot time updating the code to a CSS grid layout, and cleaning up the code. I really like the way it turned out. Although the text is difficult to read, especially links, I still like the lightning design.
I moved backwards to the initial Royfuss site from 2005 through 2007. This site had over 250 errors and warnings, and even less code. It was a total mess, especially with inline frames embedded within the table layout. Again, I updated the site to a CSS grid layout. I kept the inline frames, just because that’s how it was designed. It still validates, so it is good for now. I love the blue and green colors; I still use them in my logo today. It looks nice, especially if you are viewing it on a 800×600 CRT monitor.
I did not want to remove any links in the old sites, so browsers beware. You might hit some malicious web pages. However, I did go through and make sure all internal links worked. Both of the sites pointed to two projects of mine: Bands and Monkey HTML.
Bands was the very first website I ever created. I created it for a class. It used obsolete frameset tags. I converted it to inline frames. It looks pretty much like it is supposed to. The site is a copyright hellscape. I am pretty sure I ripped most of the information from Wikipedia, and do not ask me where I stole the images from. However, it is interesting to see where my webdesign stuff first started.
Monkey HTML is a web page I created to help me solidify my understanding of HTML. I had an obsession with monkeys, as is very apparent if you read through it. There really isn’t really much to say about it, except that it is very outdated, and should not be followed. It was a big task to covert some of the outdated to code to modern code.
When I first had this idea in 2021, I converted Broken Alliance Effect to modern HTML. I verified the code still validated, and I added it to the site today. Looking at the code, there are some things I would change, but I am out of gas. It is good enough. The site itself is interesting, because it is actually version 2 of the very first site I published on the Internet. I had a free webhost, and I had grand plans of creating machinima using StarCraft. I lost the first iteration of the site, but I remember it being somewhat similar to Royfuss (2005). The layout was the same, but the color scheme was different. Also, it included some flash stuff, which I have converted to video files.
I have several projects that I would like to add to the museum. Most of them went unpublished; some of them I have talked about. There was the review website, Twisted Metal website, Hellgate London website, and various family reunion websites. I will get to them someday.