→{michal pandyra}→pandymic

The first thing the Archive ever saw

The oldest capture of pandymic.com is a holding page: the PANDYMiC Media Network is "currently unavailable", offline "to perform a complete redesign". The redesign was three weeks away.

A 610-pixel table, hand-shaded

The first real design: a white page floating on grey, with a drop shadow built from GIF slices. The logo was four separate images (PANDYMiC) and the menu ran Index, Features, Media, Links. The home page said, in its entirety, Welcome to the Main Page!

TEMP: INDEX.ABOUT.HTML

Text sub-menus arrived: About, Contact, Articles, Columns. Behind almost every one of them was the same letter-spaced placeholder naming its own file. Most of them would say exactly that until 2005.

A résumé, as a single GIF

The exception: the résumé page, typeset as one image. (The contact page got the same treatment; that GIF is lost.)

The big reshuffle, and 黒

One-piece logo. Features split into Articles, Columns, Reviews and Misc; Media into Artwork, Audio and Video; Index gained Résumé, Portfolio and a Cam. A new button appeared: Tools. And behind the home page, a faint brush-drawn 黒 (kuro, "black", as in sirblack), its top stroke breaking up into the header. The watermark image itself was lost; this one is redrawn from that surviving stroke.

Anime, and friends in the sidebar

An Anime button, leading to PANDiME on its own subdomain. The sidebar's 88×31 buttons now included DingoStick and Aaron Ballman's Ramblings, next to MegaTokyo, Penny Arcade and the NFCR. /pacamp moved out to pacamp.pandymic.com.

The Japanese title

For a summer the header switched to a Japanese variant. Both of its images 404'd by the time the crawler came back in 2011, so this is one piece of the site nobody can see again.

PandaCAM

A 320×240 webcam, served by a twenty-line PHP script called cam.pgi. The archive caught exactly one frame.

Broken!

By December the generator's Finish button had been replaced with a red Broken!. Two months later, the whole site went with it.

Wipeout...

The entire home page. XHTML 1.0 Strict, though.

The long shadow

A new mark: PANDYMiC with its orange dot, the "i" casting one long shadow off into the distance. Nothing else.

The Lexicon survives the wipe

The dictionary came back as a standalone box, now in both directions: English → Elvish and Elvish → English.

A receipt

This receipt is somehow related to approximately $40 worth of Alcohol. I'd appreciate if someone could please tell me exactly what I had that night. Thanks! The receipt survived in a 2014 server backup: Pronto, Kyoto, 11 April 2005, 21:41. A beer, a vodka tonic, an orange juice, a mentaiko-and-squid pizza and two Canadian Club Black Labels: ¥3,320. Mystery solved, twenty-one years late.

A Japanese dictionary on the front page

The splash grew a search box: English ⇄ Japanese, with match modes up to "Full Regexp". Underneath, a preview of what was coming: Home - Wiki - Blog - Elves.

"Server crash"

The oldest surviving blog post, on a stock WordPress (Kubrick, the default theme), is about the server crashing. A fitting start.

Contact Me, in the sky

The empty sky got a contact form: From, Subject, Auth, and a Message of at most 255 characters.

jdic

The Japanese dictionary from the 2005 splash got its own red room in the new layout.

Gallery2

Photo albums on Gallery2, the open-source PHP gallery of the day, embedded in the sakura layout. The archive kept the album pages but hardly any photos; they're back, from the original files in a 2014 server backup: PAX 2005 and 2006, and Japan 2005 (Kyoto, Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima). In 2008 the gallery moved from /gallery2/ to /g/.

PANDiKI

A MediaWiki whose main page reads, in full, This magical wiki! Its skin was never archived.

"Now with more XHTML 1.1"

"Server wipe, v.2. Reinstalled Everything!" (Jan 3). A post written in the Flock browser (Jan 16). Then the page validates as XHTML 1.1: "Opera, IE, Safari, Firefox and even Lynx all render the page very neatly."

What people asked the Lexicon

The dictionary's search log survived in a 2009 database dump: 207,168 searches from August 2005 to January 2009 (only the totals are shown here, nothing about who searched). Busiest years:

• 200525,584
• 200665,830
• 200765,456
• 200848,620
• 20091,678

The most-searched words, leaving out "I", "you" and "the" (the most-searched phrase: i love you, 487 times):

1. love 2,317
2. hello 1,108
3. dark 1,056
4. fire 950
5. light 935
6. star 815
7. death 771
8. friend 705
9. shadow 687
10. moon 661
11. night 624
12. elf 576
13. dragon 568
14. black 536
15. die 518
16. heart 513
17. water 506
18. god 504
19. beautiful 498
20. sword 498

Tables out, divs in, stylesheet lost

The same design was rebuilt as an XHTML 1.1 div layout using stylesheet_xhtml.css. The archive never captured that file, so every capture of the new markup looks like this. The builds here use the table version instead.

Last light

The sakura layout's last capture. By now the Lexicon's counters printed blank.

No signal

Three years without a single capture of a page. In October 2011 the crawler came back for the old images and got 404s, which is why some 2003 chrome had to be rebuilt.

www., officially

The bare domain starts redirecting to www.pandymic.com, and in December a Drupal 7 site appears: Bartik theme, a login box and one node. This domain is presently functioning as a sandbox while I re-develop the site. Behind it, from the site's own 2014 database: four "assets" for hotlinking (New desk, Out of this World, Lego shovel, "Link quest, Zelda boobs?"), each served through a PHP module that logged every view to Google Analytics with GeoIP. Its index page said only Hello World!

...and back again

Eighteen months later the redirect flips: www. now points at the bare domain, and it stays that way.

"Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post."

Twenty Sixteen, untouched. The first of several hello-worlds.

The Lexicon's ghost

Eight years after its last counter, /tools.enel.html was still being requested, and the server still redirected it, to a page that no longer existed.

Hello, nothing

Unfortunately there is nothing to see here at this time.

The padlock

HTTPS arrives. By June the home page is Twenty Seventeen with a blurred night-street header: "Just another temporary WordPress placeholder".

The URLs become emoji

/about/ → /🧔/, /skills/ → /👔/, /projects/ → /💼/, /contact/ → /📫/, /blog/ → /📰/. Every old address 301s to an emoji.

💼 work

"Over the last 15 years I've lead or contributed to the development, deployment and maintenance of a number of projects." All 23 project screenshots survived.

📫 contact

The contact details are masked in this rebuild.

Someone, somewhere, wanted to know the Elvish for "seeing"

Thirteen years after the Lexicon's last counter, the archive logged a search for seeing, English to Elvish. It finally has an answer: eleien.

🕵 Privacy Policy

The emoji survived the redesign: the privacy policy lives at a detective. Its theme's stylesheet didn't survive the archive.

"In the meantime, check out Studiothink."

"(We're pretty cool)"

"...check out GitHub."

The last redirect is tidied up (every www. address goes to https://pandymic.com/), and the pointer moves to GitHub.