A new leafo.net

I registered leafo.net over 11 years ago, on April 25th 2004, with nothing inmind. By December I had managed to turn it into a complete CMS with messageboard, blog posts, tutorials, news aggregator, and a flash arcade. My internetfriends registered, we chatted. Sadly that was about as cool leafo.net everbecame. I was obsessed with trying to build the ultimate message board fromscratch in PHP. There were probably at least half a dozen attempts deployedover the years. The continual re-writes a result of the lessons learneddiscovering what it means to build a piece of software that isn’t a completemess.

The site has been hosted on the same shared host since 2005, I don’t even thinkit’s ever been migrated to another physical server. Every file uploadedpreserved in time since I was too lazy to move or delete anything. Many olderversions of leafo.net are still live and functional!

I did not use version control back then, so I only have access to code of theprojects from the moment I decided to stop working on them.

I was able to find three distinct versions of leafo.net still in operation, soI extracted the source to GitHub. I won’t be sharing live versions becausethey're riddled with security vulnerabilities, but you can check out the code:

• leafo.net 2005
• leafo.net 2007
• leafo.net 2009

I collected screenshots of the running versions along with screenshots I couldfind on the FTP:

One of the first released leafo.net versions, from 2005

An unreleased leafo.net forum from 2007

The released version of leafo.net in 2007

The 2009 version, never released

Even to this dayI'm still writing message board software, I wonder whatmy 16 year old self would think.

After giving up on the 2009 version of the site, along with having a community,I turned it into a plain portfolio page with a list of links. It’s pretty muchbeen like that since then. (Although the list of projects has been growingquite steadily.)

I figured it’s a good time to give leafo.net another push to see if I can turnit into something worthwhile. I dusted offsitegen with refactors and newfeatures. What you see now is thenew leafo.net.

I'd like to use leafo.net as a personal corpus. A knowledge dump where eachpost has a little bit of me and my interests at that time embedded into it.

When I was digging through leafo.net’s FTP I enjoyed the various files, images,and code I discovered from when I was in high school and college. These days mycreations are typically put elsewhere, and the leafo.net FTP is not gettingthat much use.

Hopefully I can continue the spirit of the site by keeping it updated withvarious posts, tutorials, and whatever else I can think of.

I wrote two inaugural posts:

• Using PostgreSQL with OpenResty
• An introduction to Parsing Expression Grammars with LPeg

Looking forward to another 11 years of leafo.net.