Five years ago now, I was running a web forum named FileSheep, named after the two founders - Although I totally reaffirm that it was my idea. Things were pretty popular for a forum with no direction, and we even managed to help that along by accidentally doing rather better than most at search engine optimisation.

FileSheep ended rather suddenly a while later after an argument with the guy during an MSN conversation over something stupid. I imagine that something has been lost to history by now, I couldn't even tell you where that hard disk is. I'll always remember one of the last things he said before we stopped talking though - "[You] have no concept of feel or style".

I was both outraged and about 15 years old, which didn't help a whole lot with the outrage thing. Being the big man that I was, I hit the big red circle with the line through it and gave both of us a timeout. In that time, however, he had a rage of his own and deleted the FileSheep database. No recent backups existed, we were gone. Just like that.

At the time, I refused to believe what he said, of course. He once accused me of having poor grammar and punctuation, so I responded by becoming one of those people who writes perfect sentences. I'm not sure if he was impressed by this or not, but he never questioned it again. Unfortunately, in both cases, he was quite right - My graphic and web design skills have been bad enough to be almost notorious...

Coincidentally, earlier this week I had a severely disrupted sleep schedule. One one night, I went to bed at 4am and woke up after a two hour nap at 7:30 (Yes, I can count). The day after, I went before midnight, and the day after that, I was still up at 9am. The whole thing caused me to decide to do something different, and I fired up my image editor...

The new layout is a continuation of the work I've been doing with Dynamically-Typed.com, which runs a customised version of the Arloria CMS. Theirs is actually better, and my aim is to backport a lot of their changes as soon as one of us comes up with an upgrade script. It's fluid, but it doesn't look like British weather - Something that the old theme always reminded me of.

There have been a few backports from the Dynamically-Typed fork already, such as some new login system and custom page code - Something they needed more than we did. The templating changes that arose from that project have been invaluable in making this one possible. It should be interesting to see what collaboration between the two projects allows for in the long run.

I have no idea why, but a couple of people have asked what I've done with the old one. The simple answer is nothing, and that's why it probably won't work too well anymore. It might, I don't remember; I suspect not. Still, I'll make it usable when the user control panel is updated to allow the switching of themes.

Incidentally, the guy who I argued with? Well, he started a web host, the one we've been using since at least 2006. We've collaborated on a few projects since then, although ironically I can't think of a single one. It's laughable in hindsight to think that we actually had to spend several months justifying the cost of a .com at the time, and it's even more laughable to think about how petty we were. He still believes that I have no concept of feel or style and that this was a lucky accident, though, and I'm inclined to agree.

Looks good sheep. Now you just need to update everything else I don't like. :)

Hehe, I know who you're talking about :D

Funkey

Additionally to this, I've just updated the forums to the ones used in the Dynamically-Typed fork. The convert script turned out to be rather simple, which is ominous because that usually means that I did it wrong. There aren't too many changes externally, but things are rather different on the inside. You should find that the forum trail at the top of the page works properly now, and that the redundant 'New comment' link is gone. I'll be bringing back support for polls as soon as it lands in the fork (Which I might have to end up contributing to myself, I quite like my polls), but that shouldn't be necessary for now.

Since the forums and comments are really quite different on the inside, though, I'd ask that if anyone notices things that don't work better than before, they report it to me. With any luck, it's just better code and a slightly prettier-looking trail. Saying that, though, I know about the issues with editing and deleting. I'll post when those are fixed. I just really wanted the improvements in place. ;)

hehehe I remember FileSheep. Good times.