Hello world
Hello and welcome (back) to my (new) blog. I feel an explanation is probably necessary.
I first published this website back in 2005. This was pre-Bootstrap, back when design patterns, information models, and best practice for websites had yet to be defined. Web design could be creative, experimental and often unusable.
It was with this spirit in mind, and a day-job in over-optimised ecommerce - I decided to model my web portfolio and navigation on Teletext, itself an early precursor to the world wide web.
Beyond the limited palette, this website featured a real-time clock(!), and a number based navigation system where, similar to Text TV, each page / url was a 3-digit number. Visitors could navigate via the coloured links (representing the 4 colours on the TV remote), or by typing any three digit number into their keyboard, and watch the numbers in the top left slowly tick up until the page was found. This was not good SEO, but that wasn’t the point.
Figure 1. This website in 2005, back when Flash was cool (it still is). The ‘Taken’ custom-font in the hero banner was not archived as it used css-image replacement.
Back to the future
Leaping forward to 2025. Web 2.0 is no longer the disruptive technology of the moment, large language models are.
I have made some LLM prototypes at work, but I wanted an excuse to play with Claude Code. Something useful & tangible, but also simple enough that I could focus on the technology rather than solutioning something new.In this incarnation, takenbyninjas is now a blog. I have tried to keep the original spirit of the design the same, but perhaps evolve it to modern standards and remove some of the navigation craziness.
The innovation this time round is in the tech-stack and deployment. All code & images are authored with an LLM, Google docs stands-in for a CMS, and lightweight deploy workflow fully automates publishing.
I thought you would never ask
As for the domain takenbyninjas.com , where does that originate from? It was a long time ago.
To be continued …