The history of this website
2024-06-15, updated 2024-08-08
Intro
This website has changed a lot in just a short space of time, and is likely to continue to change in the future, so I thought I'd write a timeline of sorts about this.
The beginnings - HTML2
HTML2 was a website me and a couple of my friends created to have all of our HTML in one place when we were doing HTML in computer science in Year 8. It was a simple website, hosted on replit, showcasing our very beginner HTML skills.
Eventually we had quite a lot of pages on it, and I decided that at some point it would be a part of a bigger website, which became this one.
You may notice how, on the HTML2 rehosted here, there are distinct sections for me, Jasper and Kieran (Confu doesn't exist until later). This may lead you to wonder why it is distinctly on my portion of the internet. Honestly, it's simply because I was the first to create a personal website, and already owned the repl. :shrug:
Anyway, that website was hosted on replit until they stopped letting you host your website for free indefinitely. I'm not sure if this was intended in the first place, but it was working fine at html2.wilburjwilliams.repl.co anyway so I just left it.
Fortunately, around this time I was looking at ways I could host an actual website with a custom domain. I tried to find a hosting provider, but as they all costed money (remember I'm a broke teenager), I was discouraged from doing it. That was until I was browsing other sites, and noticed how iamkate.com (I came across the website while looking at UK electricity dashboards) was hosted. I had discovered Cloudflare Pages.
The move to wilburwilliams.uk
Once I had discovered Cloudflare Pages, I made a (rare for me) impulse decision, went on 123reg, and bought my domain.
Looking back, I should've just used Cloudflare Registrar (it's roughly half price compared to 123reg, but the difference is about £5/year so it doesn't really matter). But nevertheless I bought the domain, linked it to Cloudflare, moved HTML2 to GitHub, made a basic landing page with just a link to HTML2, made a copyright section (because that came to my head first for some reason), made a basic about section, made the DNS records, and deployed.
The Original Site
After this, the website slowly developed, gaining more and more tabs, until commit 53c44d0 on the 28th of March, 2024.
This was the last ever commit on the old design of the website, now accessible at v1.old.wilburwilliams.uk (you may recognise some things from the site today).
Around this time Jasper made 'Confu' on HTML2, mainly because AuDHD (he probably has a reason for it).
The first rewrite
(probably won't be the last)
Once I had made that commit, I was already in the process of rewriting the website (at /rewrite in v1.old). This was because the code (which relied on tabs) was become more and more cumbersome and a pain to maintain, plus I just thought it could do with a redesign.
By the 9th of April the site was getting clogged again, and I had found out about is-a.dev and wanted to separate my projects from personal site, so on commit 591990f I moved all of the online programming stuff to wilbur.is-a.dev.
Over time more and more pages have been added, like previously (but less cumbersome).
This time however, to improve maintainability, I adopted dreamland.js for the navigation bar and footer of my website.
This has avoided the need to constantly repaste the same boilerplate code over and over again,
instead loading from a nav.js file.
I have also added more and more components from the old web2, like buttons and joined the Retronaut Webring.
(Edit 2024-08-08): Astro rewrite
Starting on 2024-08-04, the site was rewritten. I was originally going to go for full dreamland.js, but
ran into issues with routing and so used Astro instead. I also originally planned to rewrite the CSS but didn't
end up doing that so the site looks exactly the same as it did before, but is slightly easier to
maintain than evenn with dreamland and nav.js.
Conclusion
And that brings us up to date! Obviously not everything was covered, so if you want a more in-depth look at it ask me and that may come in future, if I can even remember everything I've done! This site is likely to continue to grow and expand over time, so watch this space.
Honourable Mention: dl.wilburwilliams.uk
That site is completely separate from the main site, and I honestly have no idea how it works. I simply forked Onedrive Vercel Index, set it up, and deployed. I got the idea from Darkn's Sh1mmer host.