I've Been Rebuilding This Website Since 1995

Published on Oct 5, 2026 — 6 min read

Revival Post

Summary

I've had some version of my own website since around 1995. Thirty years, countless redesigns, Blogger, Drupal, Ghost and apparently I'm still not finished.

Apparently I have a problem, I've had some version of my own website since around 1995.

That's more than 30 years of building websites, moving websites, redesigning websites, changing platforms, changing hosts, making them faster, breaking them, fixing them and eventually deciding everything is perfect.

Then changing it again.

Welcome to AdamSooley.ca

It started sometime around 1995

I wish I could tell you exactly what my first website looked like but I can't.

Considering it was the mid-'90s, that's probably for the best. There was almost certainly some questionable HTML involved.

What I do know from digging through old copies of this site on the Internet Archive is that I've been describing my little corner of the Internet as being around since approximately 1995 for a very long time.

Back then, having your own website meant actually building a website.

There was no Ghost.
No Drupal.
No Blogger.
No one-click Docker container.
No Cloudflare dashboard telling me about core web vitals.

You wrote some HTML, uploaded it somewhere and hoped Netscape Navigator displayed it roughly the way you intended and apparently I liked doing that enough that I never really stopped.

Eventually there was AdamSooley.com & .ca

Over the years the site became adamsooley.ca and turned into the same basic thing it still is today:

Whatever I happen to feel like writing about.
Family.
Technology.
Money.
Things around the house.
Trips.
Opinions.
Projects.

And lots of other random stuff that probably explains why the site's tagline eventually became:

Boring one person at a time!

Very accurate branding, really.

2011: Maybe Blogger will make this easier

By 2011 I'd spent years designing, developing and hosting my own websites.

So naturally I decided maybe it was time to stop doing all that work myself and I moved the site to Blogger.

At the time I was pretty heavily invested in Google's ecosystem, so Blogger made sense. Google was handling more and more of what I did online, and letting them handle the blog seemed considerably easier than maintaining everything myself and it was, for a while.

This is where anyone familiar with me can probably guess what happened next, I started missing the ability to change things.

2014: Back to doing it myself

By January 2014, the redesign bug had returned. I moved away from Blogger and rebuilt adamsooley.ca using Drupal.

Why?

Customization.

I wanted more control over how everything looked and worked. Which is apparently a recurring theme around here. The site was rebuilt, redesigned and eventually declared complete. That lasted about as long as you'd expect.

2015: New site once again

In January 2015 I published another post, its title?

New site once again.

That really should have been a warning. By then I was already worrying about many of the exact same things I've been working on in 2026.

Performance.
Page-load times.
Image sizes.
CSS and JavaScript compression.
Responsive design.
Hosting.
CDNs.
And Cloudflare.

I was even running the site through GTmetrix trying to squeeze better performance out of it.

More than a decade later, I've recently been sitting here doing basically the same thing.

Cloudflare caching.
Compression.
GTmetrix.
CSS.
JavaScript.
Image loading.

Apparently technology changes considerably faster than I do.

Then came WordPress

At some point Drupal gave way to WordPress and adamsooley.ca continued doing what it had always done.

Posts came and went.
Designs changed.
Hosting changed.

Old content moved between platforms, sometimes successfully and sometimes apparently disappearing into the Internet abyss.

That last part is something I've discovered recently while digging through old versions of the site on the Wayback Machine (AdamSooley.com AdamSooley.ca). Posts I'd completely forgotten existed are still sitting there.

Old house updates.
Family trips.
Technology reviews.
Our honeymoon.
The story of selling our first house.
And plenty of things that absolutely do not need to come back.

The Internet Archive remembers far more than I do.

Then I decided WordPress wasn't enough either

Eventually I moved again, this time to Ghost and because simply using Ghost would have been far too easy, I decided to self-host it.

Today AdamSooley.ca runs from my own UnRaid server at home.

Ghost runs in Docker.
The database runs here.
Cloudflare sits in front of it.
And I've spent an unreasonable amount of time modifying the theme.

Actually, "modifying" might be underselling it at this point.

The 2026 rebuild

The latest version started with the Bold Ghost theme but it doesn't look quite so stock anymore:

I've changed the homepage.
Reworked the post cards.
Made the entire cards clickable.
Added featured-post styling.
Built infinite scrolling.
Fixed the infinite-scroll images.
Added a proper end-of-post-list message.
Improved mobile spacing.
Built a Start Here page.

Reworked About Me.

Built a proper Recommended Products page.

Rebuilt the Contact page.

Added light and dark modes.
Moved the theme switcher.
Improved keyboard navigation.
Added a skip-to-content link.
Fixed colour contrast.
Improved headings.
Worked through accessibility problems.
Cleaned up the site's topics.
Improved related posts.
Tweaked caching.
Tweaked compression.
Tweaked Cloudflare.
Tweaked DNS.
Tweaked performance.
And then tweaked some of the tweaks.

At one point the site's time to first byte was over six seconds because of a DNS problem on my network, after fixing the resolver, it dropped to roughly 0.13 seconds.

And what will be the next design or change to this site? Next time I will ensure to retain and migrate the content as that is the real hero to keeping a site, the thoughts, ramblings and randomness of the time.

Am I boring you enough now?, that's what I do...