Farewell to the burgundy

Last week I wrote a list of everything I need to update. Second item: personal site. Here is what has been sitting at www.frankrobertanderson.com this whole time.

Look at that footer. © Copyright 2009.

That site is old enough to drive. It was built on Drupal 6, with a theme I wrote myself. I still have a soft spot for the dark burgundy background and the typewriter-font nameplate. The contact link is broken – it is supposed to point at the contact form on my Drupal.org profile.

This site was originally built when I was doing contract work for small and local businesses. I built the site in Drupal and I built most sites in Drupal. I have been using Drupal for almost twenty years, but it is no longer my only hammer. I used httrack to turn it from Drupal 6 to static HTML around the launch of Drupal 7 and I have never touched it since.

That drawing in the middle. That the figure hunched over a pad of paper – I drew that. I had several versions: a blank page, a mixing console, and a computer. This one turned out the best but I was originally going to offer, UX, Development, and Audio Mixing services too.

This site isn’t exactly embarrassing, if looked at by the right people. If anything it is very obviously not AI slop. It is a genuine artifact of what web development looked like when I got serious about it, and I am not the sort of person who pretends the earlier versions did not happen. But a site that says 2009 in the footer is not telling anyone what I can do in 2026. It is telling them I stopped.

So it gets replaced. Something static, something I can update in an afternoon, something that says what I actually work on now instead of what I hoped to sell seventeen years ago.

Seventeen years is a good run for a homepage. Longer than most jobs. You can check out the new version here.