About this web site

Early history

I have the Helvensteijn.com domain for some eight years now. In that time (and even some time before that), this web site has seen many incarnations, and most of them lasted less than a year.

Recent past

As you’ll probably have noticed, this web site now runs WordPress. This web site ran on WordPress before, but as said above, that didn’t last very long, because back then (around version 1.5), it just wasn’t mature enough to me. So I switched to something home-brew.

Sometime in late April 2007, however, I decided to give WordPress another try. Version 2.2 was about to be released, so I installed a beta locally. After some weeks of preparing, testing and tweaking, I launched this incarnation on May 12th, four days before the official WordPress 2.2 release (my testing proved the beta stable enough).

The site has seen two different layouts during the 15 months since then, and has slowly but steadily been gathering hack after hack, plugin after plugin. Mid July of 2008, coinciding with the release of WordPress 2.6, I finally decided to get rid of all the junk and start anew. So I made a fresh new WordPress installation, saving only my own content, nothing else.

I also took the opportunity to reorganize some pages. The About me page has been moved under a general About section, together with the Computers page and this one. I’ve set up redirects from the old locations to the new ones, so nobody should be presented with a 404 error because of this change.

Then, I moved my photo gallery to MobileMe. I had 20 GB of storage sitting there doing nothing, part of which now has a purpose, and besides, its web interface is just too sweet to be left unused. A few weeks later, I redesigned this site for the third time.

Current goings on

I’m pretty happy with the way things are now. There are a total of four active plugins:

  • Akismet for combatting spam comments;
  • WP.com Stats to keep track of visitor counts and stuff;
  • Search Regex is a handy bulk search&replace tool;
  • My very own plugin that generates nested HTML lists from directory trees, as seen here.

So at the moment, very little goes on behind the scenes.