Farewell Old Friend - From The Old To The New

There are better things in life than alcohol, but alcohol makes up for not having them.
Terry Pratchett

It took us a while and a lot of refreshes to get that page with that quote. It’s one of our favourites. It’s been there since (almost) day 1 of the Bent and Bongs website. And that day 1 is a looooong time ago.

We did a bit of digging and the earliest fragment of code we can find from what is now our old website is dated 7-March-2002.

To put that into context, Google only came into existence four years earlier in 1998. Yeah, they beat us. We can live with that.

We like to hope that the Bent and Bongs was one of, if not the first ever beer festival to have a website. Back then there were no modern content systems or web hosts, no one-click-installs, no cloud, no service providers. If you wanted a website you built your own webserver and put a website on it. So that’s what we did.

Version 1 of the site was a mish-mash-mixture of some web programming, some hard-coded HTML, and whatever photos we could scrabble together.

Over the years this site developed and grew. It became a labour of love. We had the server, why not use it. One of the first ever tweaks was to introduce the beer related quote on the home page. Every few seconds the site would rotate the quote to something new. Why? We speculated that this would make search engines like Google and Yahoo! (Bing didn’t launch until 2009) think that our site was more dynamic and changing than it actually was. This might help us sit up there at the top so that anyone looking for us could find us. And we think it worked.

Over the years the site grew. We added a few new bits each year. We built a database of beer lists going back almost to the 90s. We put some photos on there, a countdown to next year’s festival, and for many years we even ran our own email list and our own email servers. Oh, and we absolutely adored some of the comments posted to our guestbook.

Time moves on, and so does the internet. As each year passed we became more and more aware that our site was a bit clunky, not great on mobile devices, and was beginning to creak a bit here and there. We did ~~a bit~~ a lot of thinking. Should we bring the old tech we were using up to date? Should we completely redevelop our old site? Or should we rebuild the site from the ground up? And the more we thought about it the more the sensible answer was to rebuild everything. We could pull together the three different sites the beer festival was sitting across, throw up a second site for the charity side of things, and generally make a good job of everything. It was the hard answer, but it was the right answer.

We didn’t quite realise how hard the answer was. It seems when you add a few pages to a website each year, and you do it for years and years it grows into something massive without you noticing. We found over 200 web pages, 50+ blog posts, and … wait for it … 4,770 photos all of which we felt we should take through Photoshop to make them brighter, more vivid, and generally feel happy and cheerful just like the festival. If we could get them all online this would be quite some history going back over 20 years.

At the time of writing this we are about half way through putting all the past in place on the new site. We’ve reorganised everything twice already. It’s not easy putting 20 years of history into an easy format to click around. We figure we’ll have everything completed before the 2026 beer bash.

We really hope you like the new site. We hope it serves it’s dual purposes of telling you about the next festival and keeping all the memories from the last ones. ALL of the last ones.

September 2, 2025 was the date when we changed the DNS records to officially switch from the old site to the new site. We still have the old site running while we migrate the history off it. Maybe we’ll conjure up another post at the point we finally flip the switch and take the servers down for the last time.

If you got this far, thank you for staying with us with such a self-indulgent post. We’ll leave you with another of our favourite quotes (all of which will be appearing on the new site at some point).