project museum
hold the damn phone because i got the greatest idea ever.
you know my archive page? that graveyard of lifeless, boring screenshots? it's a sorry excuse for showcasing the evolution of my site within the past year.
but picture this: along with the boring snoozefest of screenshots, i bring those old layouts i made for the site from the graves and breathe some life into them! i make those relics of time actually usable again!
fucking brilliant. absolutely brilliant. turning that stale archive page into an actual interactive thing by turning it into an actual museum.
all i have to do is dust off the old designs, optimize the code a little bit so i don't need to reuse files, but still keeping the horrendous indentation, the bad coding habits and the poor knowledge of markup languages visible, so the world can laugh their asses off at all of it.
guess what though? i got this epiphany way too fucking late!!
because, in my infinite wisdom, i already deleted the old backups! i mean, it's natural to do, right? it's not like it's going to come back to bite you in the ass a FULL YEAR LATER!
boy oh boy did it bite my ass, it bit my ass real good.
i got an idea though.
i turned to Recuva, a tool that scans for already deleted files and can manage to recover them, and crossed my fingers.
you know what it coughed up? a bunch of files deemed "unrecoverable" and a measly single layout from last year. come on, give me a break!
i was pissed. very pissed. but not done yet.
i tried to recover some layouts which were deemed "unrecoverable" by recuva and tried to open them up. what was i thinking? "ooga booga me no trust program"?
of course they didn't recover fully, they were corrupted to all hell.
so then i searched the net for a quick way to recover corrupted zip files and i found it almost immediately. winrar. it has the ability to repair corrupted archives to an extent. cue celebrations.
i immediately downloaded winrar, spun it up and popped in a corrupted archive. and it was a success. i now had TWO layouts! two functioning layouts!
then my desperate ass got hungry for more. i tried to recover all 70 (!) backups i made, all of which were said to be completely unrecoverable because they were overwritten.
and you know how many old designs i managed to get from the 70 backups above? absolutely fucking zero!
it took me a full hour to scan the drive, recover the archives, check their content, try to recover them, check them again to see if they now worked and they were all fucked beyond repair.
but hey, two old layouts. not bad.
now, let's talk about the genius idea of rewriting the old layouts from scratch, shall we? sure, for those ancient layouts when the site was barebones and simpler than a caveman's tool, it is a walk in the park. i can rewrite those in minutes.
but for the later layouts? oh god.
you see, i like to divide the timeline of my site into two eras: the pre june 2023 overhaul era and now.
what's the meaning of this, you may ask? the pre overhaul era was a mess. it's like untangling your headphones with a fucking blindfold! what the hell was i thinking when i wrote that?!
rewriting those would be enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out and saw off my fingers! like, come on!
spaghetti code so tangled, it puts an italian grandma's cooking to shame, indentation so bad it makes your eyes bleed, coding practices so convoluted they make any puzzle look like child's play.
it was a wild west of coding practices, with me being the cowboy.
so yeah, i guess the newer layouts will be a headache and a half if i ever decide to actually rewrite them, but damn did i come a long way.