R.I.P. spencerkellis.net

Update: If you’re interested in viewing an internet relic, check out old.spencerkellis.net (no guarantees that everything works!)

You’ve probably noticed by now a bit of strange behaviour on the part of me and my websites.  (BTW, thanks to the English for the elegant ‘iour’ in behaviour, and while we’re at it also for the optional long ‘i’ in missile).  Strange blog posts with perl and linux and TinyMCE and syntax highlighting that don’t matter to WordPress and have no relevance to my current Adobe-based digital workflow.  You may also notice a change at www.spencerkellis.net.  What can be happening?

Well, it’s the end of an era.  I’ve officially retired the original spencerkellis.net and in its place I’ve copied over what has been masquerading as photography.spencerkellis.net.  I copied over a few of the articles that got hits regularly on Google (hence the spate of blog postings this evening).  I just want to document a few of the features of my old website before it disappears forever into the warm southerly beaches of internet retirement.

• Designed from scratch using PHP/MySQL/CSS/JavaScript and related technologies
• Database driven; each page in the site was made up of “snippets” and each page’s configuration was stored in a database table (also included backend management interface, see below)
• Close to 50,000 lines of PHP code, more than 2,000 lines of JavaScript, and nearly 2,000 lines of CSS (estimates calculated with linux wc -l command)
• User-based AJAX commenting system with TinyMCE integrated and custom security (never hacked or spammed once completed, and of course that’s not because of low traffice
• Flexible tagging system that spanned articles and photographs
• Search designed from scratch to return results from all site elements including tags, articles, and photographs
• AJAX- and jQuery-based photo browsing in sidebars
• Fully custom admin section:
  • Comment management system designed from scratch
  • TinyMCE article adding and editing with integrated Google Syntax Highlighter
  • Automatic image uploads with Adobe keyword extraction, automatic thumbnail generation, and tracking of ratings and views
  • Fully customizable site organization: user interface to manage what GET variables corresponding to what page(s)
  • AJAX-based interface to completely specify site pages as collections of site “snippets”
  • “snippet” management engine
  • Selection of Photoblog images and “favorite” images

In the end, feature creep doomed the site.  There were a lot of really cool and somewhat novel ideas (note similarities between my snippets and WordPress Widgets), but they required too much for one person with actual life responsibility to fully address.  It was too complex to maintain, and it was too complex to navigate.

When I designed the first revision of the site in 2004,

• I was 24 years old working at Intel as a summer intern
• I had never heard of AJAX or jQuery
• I had very sparse knowledge of CSS and Javascript
• I had never used PHP before
• My first digital SLR was just “a twinkle in my eye”
• I had never used Photoshop
• The world was somehow more innocent

Adieu, mon website.  We grew up together in so many ways.  You will be remembered.