As anybody who had bothered trying to click on my little graphic "sig" in these posts over the somewhat recent past will know, I let my Ning site die a while back ... it was costing me quite a bit per month, and didn't really have a lot lot of "oomph" to it - largely existing as a "directory" to stuff I was working on in various corners of the web. The recent revisioning of the Eschaton site picked up a lot of the slack from that (especially since I re-constructed the whole Terminal Journal archive - well, as much of it that's been scanned and set up, I still have the last two years of it to do - over there) which had been the one unique "feature" of the Ning site.Now, unlike some other sites in my inventory, which are variously showing up as "404" or ending up at "parking" pages or following inexplicable re-directs elsewhere, etc., BTRIPP.COM had been "live" ... it's just that it had the same info up from a decade ago, with a front page that was explaining that if somebody had gotten spam "from" my domain it wasn't actually coming from me (I'd been having a recurring problem with spammers spoofing a return address @btripp.com on stuff, and getting a flood of "bounced" mail in my in-box ... driving me to become an early adopter of Gmail way back when). Not exactly your most engaging (or informative) web experience.
I did regret, however, no longer having that "one-stop shopping for all things BTRIPP" that my Ning site was set up to provide, so I got the itch to re-do the quite logical BTRIPP.COM domain for that. That over there <=== is at least my first go at it. It's pretty close to what I was thinking of, but could be "fancier" (yeah, go ahead, beat me up for it being all rudimentary HTML tables), and I keep thinking of other stuff to add. I was thrilled to find those corroded metal social media icons to go with the corroded metal background ... even though the set didn't have icons for several sites that I'm on, so I had to do as best as I could muster the time/attention (no, they don't have shadows and highlights, sorry) to create icons for those. All in all, I think they look pretty cool.
Needless to say, I find it amusing to have resurrected two sites/domains that I've had for nearly 20 years over the past couple of months to work with current projects. I'm pleased at how the Eschaton site's been working out, and look forward to punching up the BTRIPP site as things progress (and if you scroll way down to the bottom of the page, there's a link to what it had looked like for most of the past decade ... just in case you're into that sort of web archaeology!).
