4til7.com has existed, almost continuously, since the mid ’90s. I say “almost” because I forgot to renew one year. Records say the domain was created on 4 Sepember 2000 but that’s the second time the domain was created. I forgot to renew the domain. If that sounds weird on multiple levels, you’re right. Automatic reminders weren’t wired into the world yet. Unrenewed domains were not immediately scarfed up by domain squatter robots. We weblogged instead of blogged and the number of domains was in the hundreds of thousands instead of hundreds of millions.

Back then, young whipper snapper, real men hand-coded websites in html while trudging uphill through six feet of snow and fighting off raiders with muskets to the left of us. Then a few years later, we trudged uphill through more snow, migrated to php and bolted on CSS when rain didn’t kill the dialup connection while fighting off indians to the right of us.

By the time I recreated the registration, I had managed to do something that was and is very difficult to do: build a website around a black background that is beautiful, readable and unique. A few years ago, I finally broke down and migrated the whole thing to WordPress. And, oh boy, did that look refuse to migrate. I’d created something too unique. After I realized it was going to take a full, ground-up, redesign to make it work, I quickly put finishing the migration into backburner mode. Many moons have passed and 4til7.com has stayed in ugly mode.

I could live with that until I began my escape from programming and cranked my posting back to it’s ’90s pace. It’s time to de-ugly the house. Doing this right will take some time, but I’ve started the process. I promise not to put a ’90s carton art yellow ‘under construction’ image up. Well, besides that one.