Back From The Dead, again!
Well, here we are again. (And again, and again…)
The Plastic Bastards website is back from the dead.
Again.
At this point we are not even sure “website” is the right word for it. It may very well qualify as an undead entity. It disappears for a while, everybody assumes it’s finally gone for good (you wish), and then somebody digs it up, runs some electricity through it, and the fucking thing starts farting again.
This particular resurrection comes after the site had been down for at least three months. Five days ago we finally decided we’d had enough, started rebuilding the whole thing, and last night it went live.
Again.
The first Plastic Bastards website went online back in 2007. Plain old hand-coded HTML, because that was what you did unless you wanted some horrifying Flash monstrosity that took fourteen minutes to load and started playing bad music at you whether you wanted it to or not. (Although we did consider it, purely for the level of obnoxiousness it would bring to the table.)
The second version was also HTML, but built around an adaptive design demo from Web Designer Wall. And that one was actually pretty fucking cool.
It was almost entirely CSS-driven and would fluidly resize itself to whatever screen you threw at it. Change the browser window size and the site changed with it. Turn the screen sideways, and it adapted in real time. Desktop, laptop, phone- no serving separate pages for different devices and resolutions. It just rearranged itself. Fucking awesome, right?!?!
This was before responsive design became the completely ordinary thing it is now.
There was one problem. The menu stayed a menu.
It scaled properly on a phone, but it didn’t magically transform itself into the little three-line hamburger icon that everybody eventually decided was the only acceptable way a mobile website was allowed to work.
People did not like this. (Wahh wahh, cry me a river, bitch.)
Apparently a perfectly functional menu that resized itself was unacceptable because it didn’t look like every other mobile menu.
And underneath all of this was the normal soul-crushing joy of web design during the browser wars.
Back then Firefox and Chrome were fighting it out while Internet Explorer sat in the corner eating paste while watching Netscape die a slow and painful death.
So websites accumulated CSS hacks.
Lots of CSS hacks.
If browser A did one thing, browser B did something slightly different, and Internet Explorer would occasionally look at perfectly valid code and respond by setting itself on fire.
Years go by, and all those little fixes, workarounds, and patches start turning into archaeological layers. Half the code is there to solve problems that haven’t existed in ten years, but nobody wants to remove anything because somewhere, somehow, doing that will probably make the logo explode. (More on this in a bit*)
So eventually we moved to WordPress, which, after a time, delivered the final insult.
WordPress is wonderful right up until it isn’t, which in our experience happens once every season.
There was always something.
You’d finally get everything working exactly the way you wanted it, and an update would come along and break the one useful thing you actually needed. Fix that, another update arrives. Now something else doesn’t work. A plugin stops cooperating. A template decides it no longer likes reality. PHP changes. WordPress changes. Something gets deprecated. Something gets “improved.”
Then something got fucked up badly enough that we couldn’t even get into WordPress to fix WordPress.
That was it.
Went into cPanel and nuked the bastard.
The new site is technically PHP, although that makes it sound considerably more sophisticated than it really is. Most of it is basically HTML sitting inside a PHP wrapper.
Which is exactly how we like it.
*We originally did the layout, HTML, and CSS ourselves. This time around, Claude helped modernize the code and clean out a lot of the ancient crap that was no longer necessary, particularly compatibility fixes left over from the days when getting a website to look the same in two different browsers required ritual sacrifice.
The result is considerably simpler. (Thank fucking god.)
There is no giant content-management system controlling the entire site anymore. No mountain of plugins. No collection of third-party themes waiting for one update to bring the whole thing crashing down.
WordPress does still exist here. Beaten into submission as our blog.
And even there, we built our own simple custom WordPress template so it actually looks like part of the Plastic Bastards site instead of some random blog that wandered in through an unlocked door and decided squatter’s rights were a lifestyle.
Will this version stay running forever?
History strongly suggests otherwise.
This website has been rebuilt, redesigned, broken, repaired, replaced, abandoned, resurrected and occasionally beaten into submission so many times since 2007 that we have absolutely no reason to believe the universe is finished fucking with it.
But right now it works.
It’s alive.
Again.
Welcome back, Plastic Bastards