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Back to more retro goodness! There have been a few months, and they were spent casually exploring different approaches to remaking the blog more compatible with older web browsers of the 1990s.

My experiments with 11ty failed. I did my best to change page encodings but the content generation system was just too UTF-8 based and I couldn't figure out how to hack it enough to stop using that encoding. So I switched to my own museum of computers and software for a solution.

In the late 1990s to about 2008, most of the web development I did was a mix of Adobe GoLive static content generation and PHP. I didn't want to get back into a PHP based solution so I could more easily browse the site offline and local, and certainly didn't want to get back into a MySQL dependency, so instead I reached for my old Macs and original GoLive software.

I first tried my tangerine iBook G3 but it was a bit on the slow side compared to my other systems and the display is small. While that would be fine if it was all I had, I had other choices, so I moved on.

I then tried with a G5 iMac I received as a donation, but didn't have the desk space to work on it anywhere but in my bedroom, and I preferred being seated or standing at my main desk, so that left me the choice between a 2003 Powermac Dual G4 MDD, or a 2000 single G4 graphite Powermac. The Dual G4 has the higher specs of course, with more modern version of OS X, and a better chance at accessing my NAS and SFTP of my web server. As a bonus it has a nicer GPU that renders 1080p resolutions, so I figured why not spoil myself at least a little? I connected it easily to ethernet and a second monitor on my desk, plugged in some wireless dongles for mouse and keys, and voilà: a VERY nice setup that's still period correct for compatibility of HTML tags and encoding formats.

There was a lot to re-learn with GoLive, even for the basics and a simple design. I had forgotten almost everything, but I found my way back to SSGdom with Stationeries and Components for page templates, headers and footers, and then I spent a couple hours copy pasting the basic HTML of my previous 11ty site into new posts for GoLive.

I'll be using this workflow going forward and it'll be super fun! It makes me happy to be using software I paid for (still), without subscription, without being data mined etc. There was nothing wrong with 2003 software and it's still just as powerful and useful today.