I haven’t been posting to the tail-end of the blog lately. I’ve mostly been in the archives, restoring information from long ago. I’ve recovered a few of my older websites back in the late 90’s, and incorporated the themes into the current blog as a template. It’s not perfect, but it lets those older versions of my website to live on as part of the accessible archive of my life here, and let’s people see where I had come from.

Part of what makes things a bit difficult is that most of my websites were designed for limited bandwidth over dial-up modems. Stylesheets and scripts were intentionally left separate, whereas today, there was so little style information that it could be included in-line. Another part is that, although I’m using templates, I’m still struggling with the CSS of the currently installed theme and WordPress styles. They were also designed for an older version of HTML where we used to use <center> and <font> tags, which are no longer in use today, and <table> tags that are no longer used for layout, in favor of stylesheets and the “new” <div> and <span> tags. Some of the web pages also used transparent GIF images to affect the layout. It’s quite interesting to modernize these old templates and web pages.

One thing that caught me off guard was that some of the sites are set up purely with VBScript to reduce file size. VBScript is no longer supported on websites. Part of the effort is reviewing the VBScript files and converting them to JavaScript, just so that I can see the final rendered output before converting them into WordPress themes.

There are five versions of the early website on http://www.lewis.moten.com that survived various data losses over the years, purely because I had saved them to a CD-ROM I made in 1999, and a sixth that was preserved on the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. The CD-ROM was a bit of a portfolio I brought to job interviews because not every company developing web pages had internet access, and I wanted a backup plan to show my work. The earliest version of the website on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a later version. By then, I was primarily using it as a parked domain that opened your email client when you clicked an image. I believe I had already started blogging at that time, and soon after, I purchased lewismoten.com for Classic ASP development. I primarily used the moten.com email service at lewis@moten.com until Gmail introduced 1 GB of free storage.

Converting old templates to fit within a WordPress template while overriding the existing one is quite difficult to pull off, but I’m slowly working through it. Part of what I’m trying to do is incorporate the existing navigation of this website into the old templates. In some cases, it didn’t make sense, as to make the original website feel original, I needed the old navigation links. I may have to revisit the issue at hand and add a second set of navigation elsewhere for the website of today. Perhaps the most confusing part will be people who visit the page and see that the appearance of the website looks old, and do not realize that it’s a revived site that is part of a larger site.

I may eventually revisit some of the old Website Templates in my gallery and set them up as individual posts, with the template incorporated into the blog as well.