November 4, 2013

Wambooli Birthmas

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

It was 17 years ago that I wrote the book Dan Gookin’s Web Wambooli. This website was created to be an online companion to that text. It has since morphed into a general support site for all my books.

I don’t know the specific date when this site first came online. Theoretically, the site first came online when I uploaded the original HTML document to the server. That might have been as early as July in 1996. My personal archives aren’t that detailed, so I don’t have a copy of that document. I suppose it was very, very limited. Indeed, it was probably silly.

If you saunter on over to the Internet WayBack Machine, you’ll see the various incarnations of Wambooli over the years. Figure 1 lists the WayBack Machine’s first capture of the site from December 23, 1996.

Figure 1. Wambooli's main web page from December 1996. Click the image to embiggen.

Figure 1. Wambooli’s main web page from December 1996. Click the image to embiggen.

The site stayed the same for about 3 or 4 years, not really changing much. It wasn’t until 2000 that I revamped the site to support all my books. At the time I debated doing an individual site for each book, but maintaining all those sites would have been hell. And keep in mind this is the time when online Web apps (such as this blog) were something you had to code yourself.

Figure 2 shows the second incarnation of Wambooli. It’s actually version 2.1; I used Adobe GoLive to create version 2.0 and it featured a lot of barely-compatible technology. The site looked terrible on non-Netscape browsers, so I changed its layout, which is shown in the Figure.

Figure 2. Wambooli 2.1. The missing figures are from the WayBack Machine's capture. Click to embiggen.

Figure 2. Wambooli 2.1. The missing figures are from the WayBack Machine’s capture. Click to embiggen.

Over the years, I’d stop working on the site, then start again. It would languish for a while. Then I would frantically update.

Figure 3 from the year 2003 shows that I’m a really terrible web designer. Not only that, I was reluctant to change anything on the site, especially to remove old information. Try not to vomit when you look at the figure.

Figure 3. Wambooli from 2003, a great example of a terribly-designed web site. Click to embiggen, but shield your eyes.

Figure 3. Wambooli from 2003, a great example of a terribly-designed web site. Click to embiggen, but shield your eyes.

In the mid-2000s I started automating Wambooli, first with the Perl programming language and eventually with PHP. Those tools allowed me to keep the site dynamic, but also to start adding some consistency.

By 2008, the site was looking pretty much as it does today. My blog was new, but not yet tied into the pages the way it is now. Figure 4 shows the previous incarnation of the site, just before a final update done in 2012.

Figure 4. Wambooli in 2010, pretty much the precursor to what you see today.

Figure 4. Wambooli in 2010, pretty much the precursor to what you see today.

This year I created a universal style sheet so that the site’s pages have some consistency. I yanked old material and ensured that things stay fresh and updated with a minimum amount of work.

In the past week I have, with great lamentation, made two changes.

First, I’m ending the monthly contest, Wambooli Win. I intended for the contest to drive traffic to the site. It failed. I may revise the contest as an annual thing and increase the prize value. That’s something I’ll ruminate upon.

Second, and sadder, is the Wambooli Tech Stock Index has been killed, murdered by Google. I knew they were dropping their API on November 1, but I somehow never made the connection that the WTSI used that API. So it’s gone! I may bring it back if I can find another API, but I’m swamped at the moment.

That’s your 17-year update! Please eat a cupcake in celebration of 17 years of Wambooli. Cheers!

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