2007-04-08
Before this blog, there was it2servu.be
A look back at my first blog from around 2007: it2servu.be, a Drupal-focused tech blog that's now mostly gone but preserved in the Wayback Machine.
Before frederikwouters.be, there was it2servu.be. A small Drupal-focused tech blog I ran around 2007-2012. The data is gone, the server is long retired, but the Wayback Machine remembers.
What was it?
it2servu.be was part personal portfolio, part technical blog. The homepage listed what I could help with: e-commerce, SEO, webserver setup (Apache, Lighttpd, Varnish, Solr, MySQL), Drupal theming, and Drupal 6 to 7 migrations. Niche stuff, but exactly what the market needed at the time.
The blog section was where I shared the things I was figuring out. Short, practical posts aimed at other developers. No fluff, just solutions.
What was on it?
Looking at the archive, the posts covered:
- Drupal Facebook login - integrating Facebook auth into a Drupal site, back when that was still new
- What to cache where in Drupal - a guide to Drupal's static caching system
- Force download for files on Lighttpd - a server config fix using mod_setenv
- Drupal Views vertical columns without tables - using div-based layouts instead of the dreaded grid tables
- Drupal Commerce webshops - getting started with the then-new commerce module
- Beginners guide to SEO - for developers who needed to understand search
- Drupal distributions presentation - a talk I gave with colleagues
- Varnish setup and configuration - caching at the server level for performance
The tech stack of the time
The blog itself ran on Drupal 7, naturally. Everything I wrote about was things I was actively using: Varnish for caching, Solr for search, Lighttpd as an alternative to Apache, Drupal Commerce for webshops. It was a different era of the web, but a lot of those fundamentals still hold up.
Where did it go?
Somewhere along the way the domain lapsed and the database got lost. These things happen. The content lives on in the Wayback Machine if you know where to look, but for all practical purposes it's gone.
I'll have to dig around on an old server someday to see if anything is recoverable. Until then, the archive is what it is.
This blog is the continuation of that story. Different name, different era, same curiosity. 🧦
