New Year, New ShamWerks

Happy New Year 2026 buddy!

The state of the world means it's starting off a bit (sic) in uncertainty, but let's keep our eyes straight ahead; that's how we get out of a curve unscathed... Or go watch a sunset, like my son is doing from inside my Beetle here: it doesn't help get out of the curve, but it's always good for your mind! 😉🤞

ShamWerks v5.0

This blog will soon be celebrating its 30th anniversary, and its latest redesign (v4.0) was going to turn 20 this year! 😲 It was high time to give it a facelift!

So, to celebrate 2026, here is version 5.0 of ShamWerks, which I've been working on for a year and a half. I considered switching to WordPress for a long time, but since I couldn't get it to do what I wanted, I finally developed my own design by hand—just like I have since the beginning of this blog! 😅 (You can see the site history here)

I took the opportunity to clean up the content a bit: there were lots of old posts that were no longer relevant, links to sites that have since disappeared, micro-posts from the great "blog" era, multiple posts that I compiled into one... In short, I cleaned things up, to refocus the content on my achievements.

The full articles published here will continue to be produced manually, the old-fashioned way—no AI here... But if I need to share a photo/video on the fly between articles (let's be honest, my posting frequency could be improved! 😅), it will happen on social media: Facebook/Instagram/YouTube (#likeAndSubscribe 😁).

On the presentation side, there are plenty of improvements:

• Simplified, more intuitive navigation, and a new, clearer, and more readable layout: let's be honest, time flies, and I myself had trouble reading my posts with the micro-font of the previous version! 🤣
• During the last major design update in 2006, I increased the layout width to 977px, as ADSL was developing... Today, with fiber optics, 5G, and higher-resolution screens, I'm switching to 1240px.
• Re-uploading hundreds of photos to get the thumbnails in the correct format and larger, high-resolution versions. I hope you enjoy it; I spent dozens of hours on it...
• Sections are now dynamically loaded, which is faster, and you'll be able to scroll like on Facetagram. 🤣
• Improved mobile accessibility: because yes, I can see you, my friend, reading this post while sitting on the toilet. 😉
• I've developed quite a few optimizations to increase display speed, and back-end tools to help with layout... Okay, you can't see this, but it makes my life much easier when updating the site. 😜
• And for fun, a random gallery of images from the site is available, to explore its content in a different way!

There you go buddy, I wish you a happy new year 2026 again, see you soon! 😉