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This page chronicles the recent history of egrabow.com: since January 1, 2007. It is the second of two history pages.
Before 2007 
2007-09 
2010-15
2015-now
Future Plans
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. Dozens of HTML pages were converted into a database and a few PHP files, making the website dynamic and easy for me to update. Archived blog posts became available . The Traffic Information System was enhanced, always giving up-to-date information on site stats or a new page without me updating 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.
2008 was an active year for me, though all the activity drew energy away from the website. That summer was my last as a TV DXer, as analogs would be ordered off air the next February. Aside from 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.
The logo was changed again in 2009, and 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 version numbers would soon be in the double-digits anyway.
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 .
Much of my 2007 design stuck around to this point, and I still liked it. The annual January 1st upgrades had seemingly outlived their usefulness. Accordingly, I decided to make 2010 the final "New Year's upgrade." The new version 28 would remain until whenever inspiration struck again. That simple.
2007's NAVbar returned, the SlideBar was enhanced, URLs were made more efficient, and pages/sections were thoroughly reorganized. My blog page was named the NTC Page, reflecting the egrabow_NTC username I was using on forum websites at the time. 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 since EG was the home of my new novel I wanted to keep a good spot on Google and other search engines. Site traffic was back up almost immediately (thanks, old HiFi catalogs!), but after two years of building and tracking I concluded it was doing precisely bupkis for my novel. The AVCA was an expansive project I had wavering interest in and that would never be "finished." After an unsuccessful attempt to move it to a wiki - thus contributing to someone else's project rather than shouldering it myself - I simply began to phase it out again in June 2013.
After I got my first smartphone, version 28.5 gave EG better mobile compatibility. The beta for "EG Mobile" opened to traffic on March 31st, 2012. Some pages forced visitors to use the main site, but it was a start. 2012 also introduced the current "highspeed marker" website logo, a modification of 2009's. Version 28.8 the following year saw the titles of certain pages change: the blog became Ramblings , the Exit 9 Page became Offramps , and the DX/Radio Page became Bandscans . I was becoming more active in the DXing hobby and began posting compilation videos of my catches on YouTube . The payoff of my student loans allowed me to get a new computer and editing software, resulting in many new videos being made in 2014. New videos in High Definition, of course.
I'd had mixed feelings about CSS up to this point, but while I liked EG's layout my techniques for bringing it to life seemed a decade or more out-of-date. I decided to update my knowledge of web design and launch a new version in July 2015, the ten year anniversary of my move to Florida and the time HTML5 was expected to become the official standard of the internet. Ever the open-source hippie I chose to stick with PHP for scripting and switched the site to a new server with updated software. Version M33 launched on July 28, 2015 with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) and fully integrated desktop and mobile viewing. The new design of EG Prime promoted my novel and YouTube channel. Also, this was the first version since 2001 to feature dark-text-light-background.
By the end of 2015 my YouTube channel had become exclusively a DXing channel, and a very active year of road trips had resulted in a series of "AM/FM/TV Bandscan" videos (why wait to DX distant TV stations when I can drive over and record them now?). In February 2016, back home and focusing on DX again, I created an Interactive Logbook for my TV and FM catches, which linked to the corresponding YouTube videos. This also allowed new loggings to appear on EG Prime.
As a Back To The Future fan I was fascinated to see Biff Tannen become president of the United States in 2017, since this meant I was living in the movie's alternate reality. In recognition of this, mentions of the year 2017 on egrabow.com appeared as "2017A". Clicking on the "A" brought you to a YouTube clip of the 1985A scene.
Doc: "Our only chance to repair the present is in the past, at the point where the timeline skewed into this tangent. In order to put the universe back as we remember it and get back to our reality, we have to find out the exact date and specific circumstances of how, when, and where young [Trump] got his hands on that [real estate] almanac."
After another two year hiatus the Audio/Video Component Archive returned again in May 2017. I just kept feeling nostalgic for the danged thing, and got the idea to run eBay ads and make money off it. Even if it didn't make a cent, I promised myself, I wouldn't take the AVCA down a third time. It was back online for good. Fortunately it's making enough cents to hold my interest and justify its continued expansion. Unlike previous versions, "MKIII" of the AVCA was not integrated into the rest of egrabow.com. From this point it kept its own navigation and visual style.
Work on my second novel, This Falling Eden , began in earnest the same year. I expanded my social media footprint and launched a Twitter account, keeping it book-centric as the writing project swallowed huge gulps of my free time. Low engagement and Musk's lame rebranding ("X" is not a name; it's a placeholder to use while you pick a name) drove me to Mastodon in 2023, which was dropped in favor of Bluesky in 2025. The single book would be split into a trilogy, and likewise its page on EG would be split into three as well.
Version M33 was only lightly tweaked over the years, as I moved again in 2019, as I marked EG's 20th anniversary at the start of 2021, and as work on my new novel ground on and on. I don't plan to make M33 the last version by any means, but it's pushing ten years and may well stick around for ten more. EG has found its groove and my attention has simply gone elsewhere. (Please buy my book... when it's finally out in 2346. ha ha)
posting this soon
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