I added an old CodeCube archive to the site. It's a pile of early CodeCube posts that I was able to pull out of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Not a perfect restoration or anything like that ... just the written parts that were still available, cleaned up enough to live here again.
The latest snapshot I used as a starting point was the August 1, 2007 capture of codecube.net. From there I followed the old item pages and category links that were still available. The archive is separate from the normal blog feed, because I don't really want a bunch of 2001-era posts suddenly pretending to be current.
Seeing these again reminded me how CodeCube started. It was during my first software job, and I started it with two coworkers, Jim and Bruce. The name was sort of inspired by 4GuysFromRolla; since there were three of us, we somehow landed on "cube." Over time I was the only one who kept posting, and eventually I just kept the domain.
It was also where I tried to actually build stuff with whatever I was learning at the time. The first version was Classic ASP, backed by an Access database, because that was a very normal thing to do back then :) I used it to figure out content management, templating, database access, little reusable controls, and whatever else seemed useful. Of course, I was also learning the hard way. When I first built it, I didn't know about SQL injection yet, so ... yeah, it was absolutely vulnerable.
A friend named George, who I had met through ONETUG, figured this out one day through the RSS feed. I had a parameter you could pass in to get feeds for different categories, and that parameter was not exactly locked down. From there he was able to get into my user table, where my password was naturally stored in clear text, because apparently I was trying to collect the entire starter set of security mistakes. He figured out my login and made a small edit to one of my posts.
Thankfully it was all good natured. He showed me what he had done and explained how it worked, and I really appreciated that. It was embarrassing, but it was also one of those lessons that sticks. I carried that one forward into the rest of my career, especially around taking input seriously and not assuming that "it works" means "it is safe."
After the custom CMS era, I eventually moved the site to WordPress. The first post from that stretch was literally Site Moved!, which is about as glamorous as migration posts usually get. WordPress was fine for a while, and a lot of the posts on this site still come from that export file behind the scenes.
Then in 2013 I started pulling it back into something I owned end-to-end again. The post Static Site Generator is basically the start of the current incarnation: a CLI tool that reads the WordPress export and generates the site. That is kind of funny in hindsight, because this whole archive project is another loop around the same idea ... taking whatever format the site used to live in, scraping the useful parts out of it, and folding it back into this repo.
That's honestly always been part of what CodeCube is for. It gives me a place to try things in public-ish, keep the useful pieces, and leave a trail. That's still true now, just with a very different toolbox. I wrote a bit about the latest round of that in What I've Been Up To Since 2025, where the experiments are more like timelines, link maps, 3D visualization, audio, and other weird little site features.
The old stuff is exactly as early-web as you'd expect: Classic ASP, Dreamweaver/UltraDev, SQL snippets, little link posts, XNA experiments, game-dev notes, and a lot of "hey, I found this thing" energy. Some of it is tiny. Some of it is basically a note to myself. Some of it is awkward. But it was fun to see the thread from "messing around with ASP" to .NET, tools, game programming, and eventually this current version of the site.
There are broken links. There are downloads I couldn't bring back. A lot of comments and images are gone. That's fine. I mostly cared about getting the writing back into the repo so the old site isn't just something I vaguely remember existing. You can browse the old pages at /archive/.