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Ok, it's time for the first blog post of this new site. Before I had a simple one-page site, and actually, over the course of many years and multiple usernames I have never really had anything public facing on my personal sites other than the simple introductory page with links out to social media, so I decided that it's about damn time I actually used my grey matter to put words onto the screen and then put those words onto the internet.
So, this first post is going to be going a little into detail of my workflow for creating this website, which is much different from the way I've made sites in the past (that is to say, pretty much entirely in basic text editors).
I've been designing my website using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. I know, I know, Dreamweaver in 2025? So this is kind of the crux of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Everything on my website (or as much as is possible) is created using older software so that my website is authentically able to do its thing on older/less featureful browsers and older computers. When I studied IT at school we did a web design course as part of the curriculum, and in that course we used Dreamweaver to create a multi-page website that used Dreamweaver for templating and such. It was an interesting way to create a templated website prior to ever learning anything like PHP or some other server-side language, but the HTML it generates is kind of tangy and weird. Well, I decided to just go for it and embrace the tang. I always enjoyed playing with Dreamweaver and I think it's a fun way to make a personal site, since it can connect over FTP and automatically upload any files when you save them.
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No! Windows XP is the version of Windows that made the biggest impression on me as a kid. I always really wanted one of those cool futuristic looking Sony VAIO desktops but I pretty much had biege boxes, 00s towers and an old business laptop I convinced my mom to buy me off the internet at a time when she was scared of shopping online. Right now this blog post is being written in Lotus WordPro (more on that later) on Windows XP in a virtual machine on my laptop, and I'm running Dreamweaver and all the other software I'll mention in this post in the VM too. It just makes things more comfortable for me and gives me a little more inspiration for making things that fit my tastes. At some point in the future I'm going to get an actual Windows XP computer set up so that I can play older PC games and create blog posts and stuff on a real computer, but for now this does the job just fine.
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Lotus WordPro is an old word processor that most people don't even consider because Microsoft Office or LibreOffice exist, but it's what I grew up with so I'm using it for writing blog posts and such just because it's such a little oddball piece of business software that I think it's kind of fun. The version I have installed is actually part of an office suite called Lotus SmartSuite, which has all sorts of insane skeumorphic 90s design for its office applications, and I'll definitely write more about that in future.
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Ulead PhotoImpact is (was?) a competitor to PhotoShop, and growing up my family PC came with a trialware version preinstalled that always claimed to be a trial but I'm not actually sure it ever had any limitations. Needless to say, being software from the early 00s, it contains a tonne of presets for creating graphics in the contemporary style which everyone now calls Frutiger Aero. There aren't that many graphics on this website (yet) but I plan to amp up the graphic design when I have some more time to come up with a more cohesive graphical style to match with what I have already designed and kind of get closer to the "golden age of web design" style. I'm using PhotoImpact 11, although I think I grew up with PI10, but it's close enough, it's fine.
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Flash player is long dead now, of course, but that doesn't mean I have to stop using it! You can still install versions of the flash player in some older browser forks, or in modern browsers you can install the Ruffle extension to play flash content. Like it or lump it, Flash player was a HUGE part of the internet, and I spent an extraordinary number of hours of my life playing flash games and watching flash animations, so I don't think it's possible for me to create a website as a shrine to the time I loved the internet and leave Flash content out of the picture. My website doesn't lean overly heavily on Flash content, but I will be creating some myself, and using old archived flash ads and little easter eggs and stuff, and I hope that at the very least you give some of it a shot with Ruffle enabled.
I have pretty much ran out of things to say in this particular blog post, but I hope you can understand the brand of nostalgia I'm trying to offer on my personal site. This post was a little list-y and maybe even very slightly technical, but I don't really want to post exclusively about computers or technology. We will have to see how it goes. If you did end up reading this far, thank you! I hope you continue to enjoy the stuff that releases on this website, be it traditional blog posts, photo galleries, or shrines or whatever else I feel like.
Bye!
Written by Vel and published on July 1st 2025 at 10:15pm GMT-6.
