Home to digital projects both active and abandoned, this is the sandpit. It’s fun and messy, not unlike its real-world namesake.
Code Snippets
Weather Station
This is my Bootstrap/JSON frontend for the weeWX server that gets data from the Acurite weather station mounted on the bird feeder pole. Fancy gauges!
Site Vault
2005 Blog
Find out what 21-year-old me thought of things. Spoiler: I whined a lot and had a high opinion of myself. But it’s the closest I got to writing in the Puckaway log back then.
2011 Brochure
I made a quick little site for Red’s bachelor party to help people find their way to Puckaway. I planned on replacing it soon after with a more involved site. And I did. It just took me four years.
2014 Concept
This is the WPA-poster-inspired prototype that led to the current WordPress site. I like tinkering with adaptive web design, but this place needed a real CMS. This concept, which I first sketched out in Microsoft Publisher, is notable for being the first place that the current logo SVG and fonts saw use.
The Forum
The phpBB board that wouldn’t die. I started this forum in 2003 as part of Pointless TV. From there it was known by several different names, served as a CMS for some hosted blogs, and was semi-resurrected in 2012 as a precursor to this site. It lives on and you can still register and post if you can answer some Mayville-centric challenge questions.
Lyssa’s 2005 Blog
I convinced my busy-nursing-student fiancée to start a Blogger blog that she didn’t really want, need, or have time for. And she married me anyway! Enjoy some early Wifey writings.
The Hedonism Arbiters
Back when we were living in our off-campus apartment, my friend Petey started up a media review site that a bunch of us contributed to. I had hosted the site for a while, so here are the first twenty reviews that everyone submitted.
Pointless TV
The online home of what’s probably still the best public access TV show to come out of Mayville, WI. Hosted by Peter Simon and myself, this was how a bunch of high school Mayvillians shared their thoughts with the world. I lost the domain name for a few years so now I intend to host this forever.
RErdmann.com
I built this for my friend Ryan back in high school to show off his photography portfolio. It was a fun little PHP project because the categories would populate automatically based on the folder contents and he could edit the site content by using text files instead of HTML.
Scooby300’s Hole
I’ve been making websites for over 20 years. In the early days, armed with some basic HTML skills and no sense of style, I made a progression of personal websites that were hosted on GeoCities, Tripod, and our old ISP, PowerWeb. Unfortunately, I lost all my backups of these sites long ago. But you know what I still have? Red’s site. Red’s glorious, FrontPage-produced, high school site, preserved right here at puckaway.net.
Update: For kicks, I’ve gone through and done some modern-day web coding to make this late 90’s HTML look the same now as it did on IE4 and Windows 98. Fonts are embedded, Java applets have been replaced with CSS tricks, and MIDI files have been converted to OGG. There’s no good reason for this, of course, and that’s what makes it great.
Design Concepts
2005 Puckaway.net
This is the oldest version of this site that I could find. It even predates my ownership of the domain name. I was just going to host it on a pointlesstv.com subdomain and call it “puckaway.net”. This iteration never got much farther than the header design, but it shows just how long I’ve been interested in making this site a reality.
DataTiki
Ahh, my design “brand”. This is what landed after Chugako’s Place, CP Industries, and phyreWorks each ran their course. Since I never actually figured out what DataTiki should do, I never finished the main site for it. This design is about as far as things ever went. Fun fact: I had a bunch of generated lipsum text in here but Google kept offering to translate it from Latin. I took that offer and the results are kind of hilarious. The body text now reflects this translation.
DataTiki Forum Template
This was the primary front end for the forum during its heyday. It came in four color variants, and I’ve added a simple CSS toggle to this demo page that lets you check them all out. This was a fun design to play with because it really took the phpBB out of phpBB.