If you’ve ended up here, then hello!
So what is this site? It’s a quick and simple place for me to roughly document whatever personal projects I’ve been working on at a given point in time. There might be some code tests, build write-ups, some straightforward writing, film ‘reviews’ or on those stormy days … even some notes on studying Japanese.
I should say I’m very much an outdoor person, and for reasons lost to time and tea for that kind of content better to have a look at nanikore.net, as that site is more focussed on motorcycling, snowboarding and the outdoor stuff these days. This site is more the indoor side of things.
From Brightblack to Brightblack today.
The original brightblack site ran from 1996 to 2008 and for the majority of that time was hand coded. I was interested in how markup worked, how CSS worked, going through various flavours of HTML, CSS and badly supported JavaScript over the years. Later I also put the site into a few different CMSs such as Drupal, TextPattern and even WordPress for a few months each.
Content wise it was mainly focussed on technology as way back then I’d started a sort-of career in IT/Engineering and around the same time had started living in Japan for the first time. Initially, though the site was called brightblack, I didn’t have the .net URL yet, that came a couple of years later. It was all hosted on whichever ISP I was on at the time, Airnet, GOL, AT&T for example in Japan and then Demon whenever I was back to the UK. I believe most of those are no longer companies.
By 2008, it had gotten to well over 120 active pages, which didn’t even include some of the whole sections I dropped in, such as when I added my whole University thesis in 2002, complete with restored diagrams and essentially an online version of what I’d submitted at University in 1996.
Between 2008 and 2016 it was somewhat on hiatus for quite a while as life away from the keyboard took precedence. Then in 2016-ish, I did return to these web origins, cleared out most of the older content and actually wrote some new content. The older stuff would come back piece-meal with retrospectives on the ‘retro’ section. Let’s just say it’s in progress and has been for well over a decade. I’m impressed at the sheer number of typos which survived so many years and revisions and most of it is really only of use and interest to me at this point, so there likely won’t be a lot being put back up.
Also, given my lack of available time, I’d rather work on new content anyway, given how it’s a bit thin on the ground.
After a short test stint in Grav (which I was testing for a friend), and then in Jekyll, as of late 2021 Brightblack now lives in the Hugo static site generator, which seems to suit it and me a lot more at this point.
What’s that name about?
The origin of the name ‘brightblack’ might seem rather obscure if you didn’t grow up in the UK during the 1980s. In 1982 Sinclair Research released the ZX Spectrum 8-bit computer. Despite the name, it only had 8 standard colours, which could be doubled with use of the BASIC ‘BRIGHT’ command.
Somehow, the idea of BRIGHT BLACK, that mythical 16th. colour, struck me as a nice oxymoron. In reality, black and BRIGHT black over RF looked pretty much the same. 15 years later in the late 1990s, stuck for a website name, I used it. There are plenty of other brightblack sites out there, and I’m curious to know where their name originated.