Happy birthday, satf.se!

The home of satf for the past year, satf.se, has now officially turned 1.

And what other time than this is the perfect time to reflect back on what satf has been known as in its long and prosperous life?

Creation of the core: 2004…

This was back when I was still a small and easily influenced boy, when the jokes were lame and the world was still a wonderful place.

Now, this is far from being a shiny love story, mind you, so sorry for shattering dreams etc.

A normal school day, and me and my friends were goofing around, as always, and thought that adding an ‘f’ to the end of all words was a good way to pass some time. “Catf”, “dogf”, “milkf” (all very intellectual words), etc. until we stumbled upon the word ’saft’ (=cordial in Swedish). Saftf sounded too weird – like something germans would do, which was why we lost the first ‘f’ making it ’satf’.

The word got stuck, and we began expanding satf to become the base of our friend circle. We became satf.

First logo of satf

What really changed the picture of satf was when I registered the domain satf.net (now squatted…) and made a website for all that is satf.

The first versions of the satf.net website are a bit of a blur to me as the first year (or two) was more consisting of me learning how to do proper XHTML and database interaction using PHP and MySQL.

A lot of (probably) crap websites and along came the first version of which I can be a bit proud of. It had my awesome cat in the header, which also symbolizes the love for cats all satf supporters had:

Original satf

Another neat feature it had was the style changer, which would change the general colour of the header and background, but also my cats eye (available in four different styles: blue, red, brown (default, cat had a blue eye – not manipulated!) and green).

The random mix: 2005 to 2006

I have very little idea of what happened during this time.

My web host (back then) had a sale on .com/.info domains, something which I took as an oppurtunity to create some time consuming work for myself and bought 3 domains.

satfcoding.com (long gone by now) was one of them, which focused on tutorials for general web development and design. It never became anything, and when the 1 year offer ran out, I decided not to continue its life.

Tumadreesuncochemuyviejo.com (also no longer available) was a gag-site I made consisting of the spanish phrase “Tu madre es un coche muy viejo” (=”Your mother is a very old car”) and “Si pantalones!” (=”Yes, pants”). The site was a huge hit for about 5 minutes among my spanish class-taking friends.

satf.info was the domain that stuck and is naturally still “alive”.

satf.info 2nd edition (used to be just an apache dir listing of flash)

satf.info became the most time consuming project for the time being, as the site always had to be updated with new flash carefully selected from 4chan /f/.

The bliss of zen: 2007

In 2007/2008 me and my friend Björn made it in to a school project to make satf.info in to a community, and letting people with an account upload flash and discuss with others.

The project went fairly well, considering the circumstances. Although the site never made it in to the vibrant community we had hoped for, it certainly became a lot more usable, and more of a full fledged site instead of just a directory listing.

satf.net got some new updates also. I started to interest myself more and more in javascript and (unluckily) found Adobe’s framework Spry. With Spry I created the satf.net version that came to be called “orange”, logically named after its main colour.

satf.net in all its orange "glory"

Now satf started making friends, too. The IRC channel #satf was created in late December and consisted of me and my new found friend, halcy.

#satf became a place to talk about life, coding, nerd stuff, linux, japanese anime and, of course, satf. Join us!

More love and hate: 2008

The start of 2008 became a turbulent year. My web host got hacked and unavailable for more than two months, which resulted in satf.net and satf.info both being locked down, and later satf.net to be domain squatted.

This was the cue for a new domain in the satf universe.

satf.se was born from the ashes of its .net predecessor and signified a fresh start in the spirit of satf and to learn from its mistakes.

For a long time, the front page of satf was just a screen saying “satf – nu på fornnordiska” (=”satf – now in forn nordic”), but after a while got a very dark layout (no screenshot of it, sorry!) and some actual content in the style of a front page with news and some static pages.

But in between that satf.se had matured into a website, I started making a score browser for the wonderful game AudioSurf called SATF AudioSurf Browser which got quite popular amongst the players. But, as I grew tired of the game for lack of new fast songs on my behalf and I stopped playing AudioSurf, the site development also came to a halt. While it’s still functional, it still suffers from some annoying quirks due to changes on AudioSurfs part.

satf.se "Sorry Pink"

After this, development on satf.se resumed yet again, and I added, edited and removed about 5 lines in the CSS code of satf.se to make the longest lasting version of satf.se as of yet, Sorry Pink, aptly named after me being sorry for using pink.

The general idea of satf.se sorry pink was that it would be like a blog. Though certain limitations made it into more of a once-a-month “hey, I actually made a new useless feature!”-site.

The end of 2008 came, and I started sketching the future of satf, which already from the start had neat round corners!

The IRC channel had in the end of 2008 grown to a comfortable size, and would at the end of 2008 harvest around 20+ people from all over the world (Sweden, Germany, Brazil, United States, and probably more!) and a few bots.

One of the bots was actually crafted by me from scratch initially called “pihlkins” which was later forked into “deerkins” after I made a web interface called the “deeritor” which enabled you to make deer (amongst other things) that was saved with the deerkins bot which could spam it out in the channel after a simple ‘deerme’ command.

satf and wine: 2009

Most of my sites, as of yet, had mostly been a logo and the rest of it. The logo has always been the center of the site, despite it being ugly or whatever. And this would certainly continue.

The lucky mishap

The new logo of satf was, as always, an accident when I accidentally rotated the ’s’ making a heart with the ‘a’. Lucky mishap. And like that, the new version of satf, dubbed “Post-excuses”, became a symbol of togetherness and love.

And this year, I promise that I will write more in the blog than ever!