The nickname dahlskebank, or Dahlske Bank, has been floating between various ideas during my life. While it started out as a funny comment on me lending out money to my friend during a drunken trip to Aalborg (on Friday, July 25th, 2003 to be precise), the name did stick with me as something that would always be available.
In the early days when everyone was on mIRC, if someone else had your nick you had to choose a different one. And if you chose something as common as “Dentist,” you’re gonna have a bad time.
Why a Unique Nick Is Everything
I can’t recall when I learned about branding, if it was while playing Counter-Strike 1.6, or if I actually read about it in some proper form, late at night on a screeching modem surfing the Interwebs. But if you’re building a brand, you need a name nobody else has, an identity you can claim for yourself, that wherever the fuck you venture into, it will be available. And that is what dahlskebank felt like. My name. My nick.
Dahlskebank has become my nickname, tag, handle, whatever you wanna call it, for every single thing I’ve encountered on Internet. Email. Gaming. Porn sites. You can find most of my links in the sidebar (or somewhere else on the site if I change themes in the future). Is it great branding, connecting it to my comments on Reddit, Imgur and 9gag? Do people confuse it way too often with Danske Bank?
The Amateur Film Vault Era (2005–2010)
What happened on 12th of October 2005 (is that actually the date it was registered?), when KiAnDe helped me register the domain, I have no recollection of… but I can tell you what dahlskebank.com has been through the years. It started out as an FTP-server hosting Norwegian amateur movies, mostly due to lack of skills and knowledge when it came to coding. Then transitioned into a website that actually served download links for those movies. Basically I had the idea for YouTube before YouTube, but fucknone of the skills necessary to implement my idea.
Dahlske Bank served as The Amateur Film Vault until end of 2010. Competing with YouTube, Vimeo, and just basic simple WordPress features, was impossible for me when I couldn’t grasp how any of that worked. The learning curve is steep, but it’s a downhill (think rollercoaster weeeee) when you’re interested in what you’re learning. In 2012 I was kinda forced by Lemon into using WordPress, where my interest for disassemble was reactivated. Oh yes, disassemble Johnny Five!
From PHP Tables to WordPress (and a Real Job)
In the beginning of 2014 my skills were good enough to land me a job working as a webdesigner slash developer. This is where Dahlske Bank became a WordPress-theme. A somewhat handwritten theme based on Underscores, using Bootstrap 3 and several other fancy plugins and dependencies. I never got around to completing a shareable theme, I had way too many ideas and features to implement, but dahlskebank was used as base for several website projects in 2014 and 2015.
Anywho, now it’s a blog. Where I ramble on and on about the projects I make, code and whatnot. The idea in 2016 was to restart my coding passion and to write a post about everything I did, for my own sanity and for knowledge purposes so I could look up how I solved stuff later on. Alas, life isn’t always easy, so there’s a 10 year gap from when I had this idea until I started fulfilling my obligation to the blog. Albeit with the use of LLms, not so much code is posted here…
Reviving the 2010 Time Capsule with Claude & Eleventy
Kinda forgot what this post was about for a second there. Dahlskebank.com started out using a website made by Inter in 2002/2003, built mostly with PHP and tables.. so many tables… Changes in PHP killed that site, changes I didn’t understand back then (still don’t). So I got Claude Code to read the whole site, all 200+ PHP files, and convert it to a functioning website built on Eleventy, while preserving the original design.
Claude got all pages to work, all internal links fixed, reconnected all files for download. Even with a simple responsive view for mobile. While I did fuck all basically. So enjoy this tiny time travel, my personal wayback machine, take a gander at what the past looked like (when it wasn’t hosted by GeoCities).