# Reviving My Website After 7 Years, 7 Months, and 7 Days

> On July 30, 2026—2,776 days after the newest post in the old archive—I preserved the site's 2018 frame and rebuilt its front door around the work I do now.

Sid Jain · Published 2026-07-30

Canonical post: https://f0rr0.dev/writing/the-website-that-waited-2776-days

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On July 30, 2026, I came back to this website exactly seven years, seven months, and seven days after the newest post in its old archive. _2018 Music in Review_ was dated December 23, 2018. That makes the publishing gap 2,776 days, which is so suspiciously tidy that it feels less like neglect and more like a very slow countdown.

The page still thought I lived in Berlin, worked at Lufthansa, and could fetch my recent life from RescueTime and Last.fm. I had moved on rather more quickly than my homepage.

## The frame I reopened

It was quite a room: Inconsolata in a narrow 700-pixel column, midnight-blue walls, cyan links, and a slab of razzmatazz pink announcing `YUPPI.ES`. The navigation offered three doors—About, Blog, and Hire Me. No gradients, cookie banners, or urgent button asking anyone to book a demo.

The introduction crossed out Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Mumbai before arriving in Berlin. I worked at Lufthansa and was passionate about lambda calculus, house music, and Mexican food. Then came the heartbeat. The page said I had been lifelogging since 2014 and promised fresh RescueTime activity and Last.fm plays beneath a tiny **“Crunching latest data...”** animation. That promise had not aged brilliantly.

<figure id="archive-screenshot">
  <Image
    src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/f0rr0/f0rr0.dev/next/src/content/blog/the-website-that-waited-2776-days/archived-homepage.webp"
    alt="The archived YUPPI.ES homepage: pink masthead, cyan links, crossed-out former cities, Berlin and Lufthansa in the introduction, and a loading message for lifelogging feeds."
    sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 672px, (min-width: 768px) 704px, (min-width: 640px) calc(100vw - 64px), calc(100vw - 32px)"
  />
  <figcaption>The archived homepage, rendered from the HTML preserved on master.</figcaption>
</figure>

The rest was equally specific. The About page remembered sixth-grade Logo, Flash animations—`.swf`, anyone?—Near-Earth Object observations, card tricks, and winning a Wordmaster championship after misspelling “hygiene”. The 404 page said:

> You should know better than hitting routes that don't exist.

Naturally, it followed this with a GIF.

The checkout I reopened was the deployed `master` branch: generated HTML, `bundle.js`, a source map, feed, icons, and article media. It had no `package.json`, so it looked at first like the editable application had gone. It hadn't. The [source survives on `dev`](https://github.com/f0rr0/f0rr0.github.io/tree/dev), running Gatsby `0.12.10` and React `15.3.2`.

I could have revived that source, but “revive” hides quite a lot of work: reconcile an obsolete Node toolchain, update old loaders, replace dead feed integrations, and then decide which 2018 facts to correct. Every repair would make the site easier to run and slightly less accurate as a record. I chose to leave the archived frame as it was and build the current site separately.

## The site I need now

The old site was organised around an introduction and live traces of my days. The [journey](/journey) is a structured account of the work. The [blog](/writing) gets to hold what a résumé cannot: the bad hypotheses, compromises, code, and things I only understood after a project had shipped.

I traded the midnight blue and neon pink for paper and amber, Inconsolata for Literata. The navigation became Blog, Résumé and GitHub. The new site felt more like somewhere I could sit down and write.

One thing I wanted to fix underneath it was the number of places I could forget to update. The résumé page, its PDF and the [JSON version](/resume.json) now come from the same structured record. [RSS](/rss.xml) comes from the articles. Changing a job once should be enough; I don't want to discover another biography six months later, still cheerfully living in the wrong city.

The old source can keep its own time. The new one has work to do.

https://github.com/f0rr0/f0rr0.dev

## Writing again

Seven years leaves plenty to write about. Some projects are easier to understand from this distance; others would have been much easier to describe if I'd written while they were happening. I'll start with the ones I still want to tell someone about.

Some posts will look back; others can follow work while the awkward questions are still visible. The old homepage can keep Berlin, Lufthansa, its five-bar music visualiser, and the feeds forever crunching their latest data. This site can be a little less patient.

Not the fastest hot reload I have ever shipped.