This page chronicles the recent history of egrabow.com: since January 1, 2007. It is the second of two history pages. <2006 2007-2009 2010-now

hits per day 2007: 597 2008: 808 2009: 373 2010: 323 2011: 791

After successfully reintroducing PHP into my life, by putting it into the AVCA and Random Pages, the server-side PHP/MySQL combo took center stage in EG2007. The content from dozens of HTML pages was poured into a database, to be accessed by a handful of PHP files... which made the website dynamic and easier for me to update. Front Page became the blog page, featuring archive as well as current posts. The Traffic Information System was enhanced, always giving up-to-date information on site stats or a new page, without me having to update anything by hand. Ditto for the TIS Scorecard ("how many days until..."). In August, alternating header graphics were used for the first time.

The color scheme went back to blue for '07, but held onto the mosaic look. Anyone who didn't like the bright text/ dark BG could now click on the new CONFIG button and view most pages in GrabowPedia Mode instead.

In 2007, I turned 25 years old, and I held a year-long "25 Years of Ryan G" celebration, posting monthly articles about the events in my life so far. The articles were inspired by something Video magazine used to do, posting covers and summaries from their magazine 10/15/20 years earlier (Popular Mechanics also has a section for this, and they have more than a century to draw on!). I modified this so that the January article, for example, covered all the events that happened in that month: "January 1990," "January 2004," etc. This coincided with a lot of self-discovery and a deepening of my Christian faith. When 2007 ended, I posted a wrap-up article, saying how much fun the project was.

2008 was an active year for me, though all the activity drew energy away from the website. That summer, I TV DXed, at least officially, for the last time. Analogs would be ordered off air the next February. Outside of this, the year’s big project was writing my first novel. From March until December, the writing project consumed nearly all of my free time. A page was started in July to monitor its progress, omitting almost every detail but explaining why I wasn’t working on the site or posting very much. It was a sacrifice, and it was worth it.

With the four-year mandate invoked again in 2009, the SuperHighway Shield was retired and a new concept was dreamed up for 2009-2012. I recognized that EG was turning away from the more-resource-oriented decision I’d set in 2007, and reversed the decision early in 2009. After the self-discovery of ’07 and the fulfilling writing of ’08, I decided to borrow the "High Definition" term being thrown around for television, and use it to highlight EG as a personal site that better reflects the man I am. I also abandoned the original version numbers (2001 = 1, 2008 = 8) and aligned them with my age (2009 = 27). Not only did this highlight the renewed personal-site goal, but it’s not like they weren’t gonna be double-digits soon, anyway.

The NTC branding I set up for MySpace and other sites began to merge with egrabow.com again. In July, an RSS feed was started on LiveJournal as an extention of this website's blog.

On October 8, 2009, my first novel Caffeine was released on egrabow.com. Printer-friendly and text-only formats were created in addition to the "novel format." A few months later, I began posting the book on other sites and set up a low-budget Google AdWords campaign for egrabow.com/caffeine .

For the third year in a row, I found myself satisfied with the existing (EG2007-based) site layout. Not only did I look back on version 7 and still approve of how I'd designed and planned everything (even if it couldn't all be implemented right away... the plans for my EXIT 9 Page took two years), but I decided that 2008 and 2009's upgrades were inferior to what they replaced. I love innovation, but hate change-for-the-sake-of-change... yet I now saw it on my own website. Yuck.

I realized that some of my policies were badly out of date, set up when I was still learning HTML and figuring out what to do with my website. Annual (January 1st) upgrades had outlived their usefulness, as had the four-year mandate. I decided to rip up the foundations and rebuild the policies that govern EG. I wanted to examine what worked well in the past and what didn't... then use the best of it to reimagine EG2007 as a long-term upgrade, one that was as useful as I could make it. January 1, 2010 would be the ninth and last "New Year's upgrade." Version 28 would be that grand project the others had merely led up to.

2007's NAVbar returned, the SlideBar was enhanced, URLs were made more efficient, and pages/sections were thoroughly reorganized. My egrabow_NTC identity on other websites was merged with this one, resulting in my blog page becoming the NTC Page. The PHP and MySQL back-end was rewritten, implimenting long-desired features I'd had to use workarounds for, and tossing out ones I never used. Rounding these out was my transition to transparent PNG graphics, which looked fantastic provided the visitor wasn't using an old version of Internet Explorer (in which case they'd see a warning at the top of the screen).

After closing it two years prior, I decided to bring back the Audio/Video Component Archive in January 2011. I'd never been able to replace it in terms of traffic, and I wanted to keep a good spot on Google and other search engines. I essentially gave it a reboot and added a "MKII" to its logo (mark 2). Site traffic was back up almost immediately. Thanks, old catalogs!

2012 saw EG expand into the mobile realm. The site logo was modified for version 28.5, which launched March 31 and included the beta "EG Mobile".