A trip down Memory Lane

The last version of my car blog under the name Gosto mais de Carros do que Chocolates.

The blog was rebranded with very few changes to the website layout.

This version replaced my personal blog, using the domain again for my portfolio. I also switched from portuguese to english.

It was something quickly put together, I used PHP in conjunction with Gulp to create a static website generator.

In this website EV owners could add their charging sessions and with data from energy providers the emissions per kilometer were calculated.

The idea of this site was to help kill the myth that EVs pollute more than a conventional car or that they are powered by coal.

Not many EV owners participated and the majority of visits to the site were to check the emissions in each country, so I repurposed the code and created Nowtricity, focusing only on country emissions.

My car blog, this was the second version of that blog, and was online since 2010.

Was online until January 2019, replaced to use my own CMS as I was getting tired of the bloat that comes with WordPress.

Only really used WordPress as a place to paste text and moderate comments, as everything else (media and text) was processed elsewhere.

It was my first WordPress blog and also my last one.

This was the site that I used to create my own CMS. It was a good testbed for things like full-text search, cache invalidation, queries to check for duplicate content and so on.

It had popular sayings and proverbs from Portugal, but nowadays no one cares about old sayings, only likes and Instagram followers so the number of visits was getting lower and lower so I just shut it down.

A Facebook like a day doesn't matter anyway.

Instead of using this domain for my portfolio I tried to create a blog here.

It was written in Portuguese, focused on web development subjects like compression, SSL, cPanel configurations, etc.

There was a quarterly feature where I would share the statistics of multiple personal websites and gave the percentages of users with different browsers and operating systems.

Due to little time to keep it updated I eventually used the domain again just to display my portfolio.

A new law was passed to make it illegal for department stores to give free plastic bags to their customers. The cost of a plastic bag was now 10 cents, but some greedy businesses started to charge for bags that weren't covered by this new law.

The idea was to name and shame such businesses but fortunately (unfortunately for the website) such practices quickly stopped after the backlash from the consumers.

The Portuguese also now adopted reusable bags so the website really didn't have a purpose anymore.

The Internet loves cats and dogs. I mean, who doesn't? Pictures, videos, memes, the Internet is full of it.

This was my attempt to make a website targeting that topic. It had some success in Brazil, I guess we Portuguese don't like cute dogs that much, but lack of time and personal interest in the website led to its demise so eventually it was shut down.

This site began in May of 2006, but only in 2008 it gained notoriety with the massive price increases of fuel in Portugal.

On the first of December, 2013, a new version with a fresh new design, total code refactoring from the ground up and new functionality replaced the first version that lasted for more than 7 years.

With the boom of the hybrid cars like the Prius and Civic IMA and public interest in new subjects like ecodriving I created this website, even before the idea for Mais Gasolina.

With technical data of hybrid and electric cars, articles about laws, fiscal grants, new technologies and the environmental impact of having a car, it had quite some traffic.

Eventually I started to write about green cars on my car blog and no longer updated this website, so I redirected the traffic to it.

This site was about tv series with information about the cast, characters and episode guides of shows like Family Guy, South Park, Simpsons, Initial D and some classic shows like Fresh Prince of Bel Air and MacGyver.

Lack of time and interest meant the website wasn't updated as often as desirable.

The number of site visitors was also low so I put the site offline.

I'm a petrolhead and a web developer.

So why not create a website about my car to share information with other 406 Coupé owners?

The site had moderate success, and most of the content was about sound deadening and car detailing.

For privacy reasons, and since there were good resources online with technical guides I shut it down.

Eventually the articles about deadening were reuploaded to "Sound Deadening", this time in English.

My car blog, the name roughly translates to I like cars more than I like chocolate.

Powered by WordPress, the design was practically the same for 5 years, so it was eventually updated in 2010 to a fresher look, bigger text and white space.

It was designed for small screen resolutions (1024x768) as it was the most used screen resolution in 2005.

A DMOZ inspired website directory for Portugal, with thumbnails of each website.

The number of visitors started to decline after 2007 as web directories were no longer a go-to resource, with web users preferring search engines like Google so it was shut down.

This site was going to be a sort of network between my multiple car related websites.

I did keep the site online for 5 years but never really invested any time in it, so it was just a one page website with links for each site.

This was the second version of my freelance website.

Used to promote my web development and hosting services.

Since I stopped doing freelance work and having web hosting the site was shut down.

The first version of Titanium Solutions were I promoted my development and hosting services.

The site was also used as my professional aptitude test at school. It was so long ago that the menu was in Flash.

Titanium was the theme of the site, to pass the image of a strong web presence.

Examples where titanium was used to overcome engineering problems like the SR-71 Blackbird, the Koenigsegg CCR and Tokyo Forum where shared on the website as trivia to try and stand out of other websites in this market.

I have no idea of how many versions of my personal portfolio I have created, but this one was created in 2005.

It was the version before the blog was created on this domain.

Was not visually pleasant, apart from the header and navigation menu.

The second version of my personal portfolio, created in mid 2002.

It used frames, had those stupid angles and 3d effects that were all the rage back then.

Started to play an annoying music as soon as we entered the site, like a multitude of other sites of the time.

Oh, and it was, you know... Orange! Why? At least it wasn't black with white text and the OCR A Extended font.

My first ever website was Sprint Total, a site about car modifications.

The images were 500px wide and were scanned, there were no digital cameras back then.

This site had multiple versions, I even had a friend create the design for one of the versions.

It was with this site that I learned HTML, CSS, JS and PHP.

Sadly I didn't save any previous versions of the site, only the last one (screenshot), from 2004.

It was one of the reasons why I did this "Trip down Memory Lane", to keep backups of old websites.

Web Archive still has the version previous to the one on the screenshot, but it's missing lots of images and the header in flash.