Remembering a first encounter with an inspirational personal website

The abiding delight of methodically re-publishing posts from previous blogging machines has been to rediscover things I enjoyed and had forgotten. On this day 18 years ago, for example, I first wrote about Dunstan Orchard’s amazing website. He explained, with just the right amount of detail, how to add drop shadows to images on the web, which was a thing we used to do. I clearly remember being totally amazed by his website, immediately adding it to my blogroll, and then following along as he animated his banner to reflect current weather and time of day, made marvellous images of his dog doing insane things and animated a beautiful little short. It was astonishing, the way Dunstan taught his site to sing and dance without ever losing its clear, open design.

Of course he went on to greater things, which prevented him from doing much blogging, although he did show up on IG from time to time.

In any case, when I went back to look for the post that first inspired me to visit, I was thrilled to discover that he has kept the site alive, with impressive assistance to grab the new URL of an old post. An exemplar in every sense.

And then, on a whim, I looked for his new site which isn’t exactly super busy, but which has a feed. I immediately added it to my blogroll.

I never did implement drop shadows, nor will I ever. But the bigger lesson, if there is one, is how much more CSS can do these days. I use some of that, badly.