The Jorisvandijk.com domain goes back quite a while. Using any whois tool, you can discover it’s been registered 17 years, 3 months and 26 days ago on January 31st 2009. It first appears in the Wayback Machine1 on the 13th of July 2003. Have a look at it in all its glory.
July 13th 2003
As you can see it’s not completely cached. The iframe on the left got lost. If you read the text you’ll notice this is not the first iteration of this site either. I upgraded from using tables for the UI, to using div elements. Cool. 2003 is six years older than 2009. But looking at the footer of the site in the image, you can see the real date it was once registered. 1997. That’s 29 years ago! This address is ancient. It predates the likes of YouTube and even Google (by a year, give or take).
I think that’s pretty cool. Then in 2004 I lost interest in working on and maintaining the site at the domain, so it became a placeholder. This won’t be the last time it’ll be subjected to this cruel fate. It kept the same styling though.
April 14th 2004
This dragged on until sometime around April, when I eventually let go of the domain. Google had launched Gmail a year prior and I jumped on that ship. No need to keep my own domain.
April 6th 2005
More than five years passed until something sparked my love for building and maintaining websites again. I remember damned near praying my domain was still available. Luckily it was. No other Joris van Dijk had decided to pick up webdevving as a hobby. I remember letting out a sigh of relief and I got to work on a new version of the site. This time around I wanted it to have a couple of functions. Firstly as a blog. Not just my own, no, for family members too. The site was in Dutch this time around, as we’re from the Netherlands. The second function was to host my projects. I don’t remember what those were though. The site, powered by the Drupal CMS2 (Content Management System), also hosted family pictures and videos I ripped from old video tapes and encoded, then uploaded and shared with my family.
February 8th 2011
I still really like the logo I made. I was super proud of it at the time. Anyway, this version of the site didn’t last. My relationship had ended and I didn’t want to deal with everything written by her and her family on my site. I also had gotten into Linux a year prior, so I poured my spare time into building the Bodhi Linux website3. And for the second time, the poor domain was a placeholder again.
November 24th 2011
Not for long this time. I decided I still loved the looks of the old site, so after some reworking and minor edits, it got reused. This time as a personal blog in English. The type of content wasn’t all personal, it also started to include technology and Linux related posts and even some technical tutorials.
June 2nd 2012
But as always, shiny new things are more interesting than dull old ones. I discovered WordPress4. This site got a completely new look and had some proper responsive design even. The type of content stayed the same, though. I found my niche and I was (and still am) enjoying blogging about these things a lot. I also just now realized that this is the first time the Wayback Machine has cached most of the actual content for my site, not just the home page. One could still browse it over there as long as they keep it up.
June 3rd 2013
Then in a post, dated November 17 2014, I stated: “And yet again I grew tired of the way the website looked. This time it’s because of my recent work on the Bodhi Linux webite. A server crash kicked me in high gear and I found myself once again building a website. What’s more, I enjoyed it. So much so that I couldn’t help myself and had to tinker with my own site again as well.” Unfortunately it seems that for some reason the Wayback Machine did not back up the CSS for this site, leaving it looking rather sad.
February 21st 2015
It took five months for the Wayback Machine to get a capture with proper CSS and apparently I settled on a very different look. Honestly I don’t recall this version of the site at all.
August 1st 2015
While it remained looking like this, no new post were made on the site for months. I had met my now wife at this time. And wouldn’t you know it, the poor domain got relegated to being a placeholder for the fourth time in its life. The capture of it isn’t quite right as the text “Joris van Dijk” would have been on one line and not overlapping the URL. Anyway, life got too busy and I just didn’t have the time to be playing around with websites. I also recall work was hectic as well at the time. I spent many days abroad at this time.
September 21st 2016
Almost a year later it seems I got sassy and decided on an… interesting revamp. Still a placeholder website.
August 3rd 2017
I regretted this some two months later, and left the place looking like this.
October 4th 2017
The next change to the site is an important one. A milestone and a huge leap forward for my personal wellbeing and happiness. Can you spot what happened?
April 18th 2018
And more than a year later, I decided I didn’t just want Facebook gone, I don’t need anyone emailing me either!
July 17th 2019
Then out of nowhere, nearly two whole years later, I decide the placeholder needs a new coat of paint. So we get the following.
May 8th 2021
A year later, nearly to the day, I post a Hello World post on my new website. As I put it at the time: “This is the first post made on the new version of this website. I am making it to commemorate the occasion. As of yet there obviously isn’t much content, but that may change in the future. This site used to be a lot of things over the years, but for the past few it has been nothing more than a placeholder.” Unfortunately the first decent snapshot takes a few months, but when it does, the site looks like this. After six years there’s finally a real website at this domain again. This website is using Eleventy5 as its backend.
June 26th 2022
The website mostly remains the same. Some slight tweaks like a bit more width for the content and a new tagline. Apart from that, I do a lot of writing for this place during this time. I have rekindled my love for blogging and wouldn’t you know, the topic remains the same. Unfortunately for some reason I stop blogging after November 3rd 2023.
April 2nd 2023
After a long lull of not actually posting any new blogs to the site, come 2025 I decide a new look is what I need to start writing again. This time around, I thought let’s do this like a documentation website. I used Docusaurus6 for this one.
March 30th 2025
It’s not long lived though as within a couple of months I have a completely new website. Based on Hugo7 now. This site first pops up on the Wayback Machine in August and it’s close to the current iteration of this website. The one you’re looking at now. Sure the font is different and it still sports cover images, but it is this website.
August 26th 2025
The latest snapshot the Wayback Machine took was from today. But as we’ve seen, things change all the time and the snapshot they took is already outdated as it does not reflect the current state of the website.
May 27th 2026
And this is what the website looks like right now, before posting this blog. It’s been a long journey, but it’s fun to look back on things and remember what they were like. This post is like a scrapbook, a thing to look back on and remember. And it shows that nothing stays the same.
This domain has been around. It’s been lost and found. It’s been loved and neglected. It’s had many faces and uses. I hope it’s with me for some time to come.
May 27th 2026 but live
