A new leafo.net
I registered leafo.net over 11 years ago, on April 25th 2004, with nothing in mind. By December I had managed to turn it into a complete CMS with message board, blog posts, tutorials, news aggregator, and a flash arcade. My internet friends registered, we chatted. Sadly that was about as cool leafo.net ever became. I was obsessed with trying to build the ultimate message board from scratch in PHP. There were probably at least half a dozen attempts deployed over the years. The continual re-writes a result of the lessons learned discovering what it means to build a piece of software that isn’t a complete mess.
The site has been hosted on the same shared host since 2005, I don’t even think it’s ever been migrated to another physical server. Every file uploaded preserved in time since I was too lazy to move or delete anything. Many older versions of leafo.net are still live and functional!
I did not use version control back then, so I only have access to code of the projects from the moment I decided to stop working on them.
I was able to find three distinct versions of leafo.net still in operation, so I extracted the source to GitHub. I won’t be sharing live versions because they're riddled with security vulnerabilities, but you can check out the code:
I collected screenshots of the running versions along with screenshots I could find on the FTP:
Even to this day I'm still writing message board software, I wonder what my 16 year old self would think.
After giving up on the 2009 version of the site, along with having a community, I turned it into a plain portfolio page with a list of links. It’s pretty much been like that since then. (Although the list of projects has been growing quite steadily.)
I figured it’s a good time to give leafo.net another push to see if I can turn it into something worthwhile. I dusted off sitegen with refactors and new features. What you see now is the new leafo.net.
I'd like to use leafo.net as a personal corpus. A knowledge dump where each post has a little bit of me and my interests at that time embedded into it.
When I was digging through leafo.net’s FTP I enjoyed the various files, images, and code I discovered from when I was in high school and college. These days my creations are typically put elsewhere, and the leafo.net FTP is not getting that much use.
Hopefully I can continue the spirit of the site by keeping it updated with various posts, tutorials, and whatever else I can think of.
I wrote two inaugural posts:
Looking forward to another 11 years of leafo.net.