lmb_me_history

what's this?

it's the attempt to record some of the history of letmebreathe. the site has existed for, at the time of writing this, almost four years (although the idea is even older than that). it may be boring to you but it was a lot of fun digging out all these old versions – at least the ones i could find – and see what changed when...

concept

at the beginning, there wasn't really a concept. i had a site called stargrumps which was basically the first site i ever created. it started off with a star wars parody written first by me, then by a couple of friends of mine, and then slowly turned into that unholy mess of more or less funny stuff.
then there was the time when i started creating images, writing poetry and short stories and i thought, hey, wouldn't it be nice to put them online somewhere! stargrumps was hardly the place for that, so the idea of something like letmebreathe was born.

the name

back in the first version i last wrote about the name letmebreathe. back in 2002 i was reading a rather regular weblog-like thingie by someone at lionhead studios. he, besides recommending sigur rós to his readers (thus me as well), also told people to listen to a song called "the dolphin's cry" by live. i did, and somewhere in the song there are the lines:

this crazy fog surrounds me
you wrap your legs around me
all I can do to try and breathe
let me breathe so that I
so we can go together!

this song exactly hit my nerve and there it was, letmebreathe, for short lmb.

versions

here you can see the development of letmebreathe. i tried to find out an approximate date of release for each version but i wasn't really keeping track of all that so some of it may be wildly inaccurate.

version 1.0, 2002-02-11

this is it, the first one. the site was built in less than four days which, honestly, explains quite a lot. it featured a lot of unique content, most of which has been preserved until today, but the design was, well, something to be improved.

version 2.0/2.1, 2002-05-19

these versions, all released quite shortly after one another, marked the probably most significant step letmebreathe has taken so far. directly after the day 2.0 was released and included a really nice layout (i still like it, which is pretty rare), the diary section was added, the only area of the site that gets updated reasonably often...
2.1 marked the step away from my free .tk-domain over to my first very own toplevel domain letmebreathe.net.

version 2.2/2.3, 2004-06-??

this was a phase of experiments. in 2.2, i added a skinning engine so every visitor could chose between a couple (that is two) designs for the site. it was quite a long process getting everything to work without having to put all the stuff online twice (or n-times for n styles) but it only lasted a couple of weeks until i got sick and tired of it. i threw all the stuff out and basically had a black site with white content (luckily there is no copy of that available anywhere).

version 2.4, 2004-07-02

2.4 was also done in about two days. i also really liked this layout but it had some inherent problems. it was opened in a popup, used some ugly hacks to get around everything and... generally was not that great from a technical point of view (which i really care for as well).
the versions after that just changed the background twice and threw the popup out but no real changes were made to the structure.

future

so, what's in stock for letmebreathe? honestly, i have no idea. as i'm writing all this, it's april 13th 2006 and the migration to 3.0 is progressing nicely. there's a lot to be written and a lot to be changed but i really like the result so far.
letmebreathe has always been developing. even when it stalled for a while, i had some ideas in my head how to change the site. and i honestly doubt that this will change in the near future.