The site in the past

Posted on 19 May 2022.

This site has been up for 6 years at this point. Let's look back at it's history and the versions it went through.

Initial versions

The site started back near the start of 2016 when I took 'Informatics' as a subject in high school (its Dutch equivalent) and one of the projects was to make a simple site. This seeded the thought of being able to make my own site, and two of my classmates joined in having this thought as well (with a third joining later). Then, with the help of somewhat crappy free hosting with a free subdomain, this site was born on februari 28th that year, available (back then) at elzod.16mb.com.

The initial version of the site had three main pages, a homepage and two pages for projects, those that had their own page and those that where all collected on a single page. The projects it started with were the three Minecraft maps I made, Rednutale and the two SMW-hacks as those that got their own pages, and the maps of Minecraft maps, some text files and the SMB3 tile-rip collected on the other page. Then the site went through quite a few updates and changes in the span of about a year:

PHP started being used on the backend, mainly for being able to include a header and footer on pages and its mail-capabilites were used for a contact-form.
I became quite a big fan of Undertale, and the font was changed to the font used in that game.
Some tutorials were added about modding Undertale, and the structure was changed to Minecraft and Undertale having their own pages for projects.
Minecraft gained a download for my own attempt at a texture pack, 'The simply drawn pack', aptly named for being drawn 'simply' (which really meant 'badly').
A attempt at a tutorial for Lunar Magic, an editor for Super Mario World, was added. This was later removed as motivation was lost.
I became a fan of messing aroung with Google Translate, translating stuff into Japanese and back, which (back then) gave some quite nonsensical results. This led to a second copy of the site being added that had all of the text pumped though this process. This also ended up being removed later.
Screenshots for an attempt at rebuilding the Underground (the world Undertale takes place in) in Minecraft were added.
A bunch of other smaller projects were added over time, some using PHP, including the first versions of 'Message Test' which grew into becoming ElzChat.

Additionally, because I used to use a editor wth FTP-support to make changes straight on the website, a folder with other projects that were not linked on the main site started to grow. This included the first messing aroung with Javascript for making basic games (which grew into the JS-port of This Is The Only Level), my first emulator (for Chip-8), some attempts at making editors for games and some other stuff.

Of the projects that ended up on the 'final' version of this initial site, most of the bigger ones are still available on my site to this day. Some did not make it though, like The Simply Drawn Pack, The Underground in Minecraft, and some of the smaller projects because I did not feel like these warranted still being available or I lost motivation for them.

A copy of this 'final' version of the initial site is now available here, which was the site's state around januari 2017. 'Testing stuff' refers to the folder with other projects.

The redesign

Around the start of 2017, work started on a redesign of the site to make it look nicer and to give it a mobile-responsive design. The list of projects and their pages were now programmatically generated instead of menually written and a tag-system was also introduced to allow finding similar projects. The looks of the redesign remain in use to this day, as well as all the projects that made it in and those that were added later. The site was switched over to this new version in februari of 2017, with the old site still being available for a while.

The free hosting I was using was starting to show problems, though. It started refusing to allow me to upload new files, and was overall not that great. Eventually, it broke completely, and I ended up moving the site over to a server one of my friends had at home. It performed quite badly though, and my site was now a subdirectory on their domain. At the start of 2018, when I was half a year into my study for a bachelors of software engineering, one of my classmates there somewhat pushed me into getting a VPS to host the website on instead. So I got a VPS and switched over to hosting it there, and got a domain to go with it, elzod.ovh, which is still the domain used to this day.

After a while, I started thinking about switching over to Node.js on the backend, mainly because the program I was using to handle running PHP locally stopped working properly. I wrote a simple version of a new backend, scrapped it for another version, which I had pretty much feature-complete (including the formerly PHP-based projects) for a while but neglected to upload to the VPS for a while.

Then my VPS burned down. It remained offline for a while and when the company gave me a new VPS to use, the Node.js version was uploaded. It lost the tags (the weren't all that useful) but was otherwise an invisible change. Some updates since then did happen, like the font being removed, links to my external projects (on Github) being added, a light-mode being added and this blog appearing. One final change that happened is that I switched VPS-provider, from the company I originally got it from to a new company set up by one of my friends. The core backend/frontend however has remained since that original reupload, and is what you're reading this post on right now.

And that's about it for the history of this site. I have thought about making some bigger changes to the site in the future, to turn it more into a portfolio-site, but I will definitely try to keep this site around as well.