Wayback on fabricerequin.com

Tue 2013/02/26 8:39 UTC  |  Diary

Fabrice Requin

Hello and welcome to my blog. This blog is considered my haven when everything...

How would it feel to be able to have a glimpse of certain stages of your blog from the time it started until now? You might think naa impossible I changed layouts or I deleted/lost some posts. Well the other day, my cousin’s fiance introduced me to Wayback Machine, a site where you can browse through over 240 billion web pages archived from 1996 to just a few months ago. Youll be amazed at what you encounter, for those who know me since I first started blogging back in 2009 will know that throughout my blogging years I have changed layout/theme of my blog countless of times. The thing is not once I decided to screenshot the layout and save it for future reference and further, at one stage lost quite a bit of my old posts due to the change in hosting as well deleting some myself, so I was pretty overwhelmed when I saw some of it back. Its also a reminder at not only how much your blog layout as changed through time but also how much youve changed in terms of writing and approach.

To fellow bloggers out there try it out and re-live those moments youll definitely be saying “ah I remember that time!”. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.

Let me know how it went too. Heres a couple of screenshot I managed to retrieve from my site. According to the archives http://fabricerequin.com has been crawled 52 times going all the way back to December 7, 2009. Like mentioned you can click on the blue circle on the selected date to view your blog’s screenshot. “Final Haven” was the first name for my blog and this was my first post which got lost I remember 2 years ago when changing host, the archive didnt managed to save the layout at that time but I was using the theme called Blog oh blog by Bob. 2010 was a year of change, from “Final Haven” went to simply “Fabrice Requin”, the previous theme you saw I changed to another theme (which youll see something similar on the picture after the next one with the girl in the header) but that lasted a few months until I changed to this famously dannychoo inspired theme done by a friend in June. Although I was excited at first but after a few weeks I kinda suffered harsh comments which affected me in way that I stopped blogging in August. The break lasted until late October when I regained a bit of will for blogging. Decided to start from scratch, change host, delete everything (which I regretted) and move forward. Once I got back rolling with the blog little by little, I worked on a new theme and decided to redo a similar design as the theme I did before moving to dannychoo mockup but this time doing it with a new layout designer called “lightword“. I felt that everything was going fine back then, I had more and more views which lead to me meeting new comrades in the blogsphere which I still follow and I was just happier with how things was panning out so I wanted to go back to that as if nothing happened. As months past, It wasnt until July 2011 that the blog saw changes again. I was inspired by colors and found this lovely flowery background to help build on a new theme called “Bigfeature“. The name changed to “Colorfusical” in order to relate to the layout, however that lasted around two weeks when my lecturer in Uni asked the class what we thought of fate or destiny and its impact or influence on individuals, we had to formulate an answer for the next class. While thinking about it one night I realized I like the word or am a believer of fate and for some reason my blog came up in mind and then the word “A Fateful Encounter” followed. I have to say that during those months with that Bigfeature theme I learnt more and more about its flexibility and its different templates that prompted me to play around with and in a matter of a few hours one night came up with a mockup of this layout similar you see above but given I then started traveling, I put further work on halt. The completed layout was put up at the beginning of 2012 with “A Fateful Encounter” changed into now to date “Fateful Encounters”. Working on the same layout, I updated a few things on this one especially with the colorful navigation and the slider unfortunately this picture was the only closest I could retrieved but Im sure those thats been on my blog for a while will remember plus it was done in September 2012. And finally (you must be thinking my goodness again he changed!) I came up with my now current theme put up in December 2012. Being still with Bigfeature theme, I again build on it and what stayed the same from the previous was mostly all the pages with the thumbnail (here is an example), the major changes was obviously the frontpage with has an influenced from shibuya246 with a touch of dannychoo’s figurefm. Some of you might be wondering about dannychoo after what happened before but I am stronger realised in the end of the day the problem wasnt the theme but the fact I couldnt deal with the comments, its not like im the only one that takes influence from him, many do and Im proud of taking inspiration from him, whats important is whats written and I’ll do my best to continue being me.

Now that went kinda alright, not too long? I must admit I amazed at how many times I changed, god hope im going to stick with this layout is just start focusing on writting which I havent been doing much! Make sure to let me know how it went with you :)

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Fabrice is a blogger, full time university student, web enthusiast and founder of Fateful Encounters.. This blog is his final haven when everything seems nuisances; urging him to assess and to share his thoughts and his own findings to the world, or at least to his fellow neighbors in the blog sphere.