Almost two years ago, I purchased the domain name 'yourfutureisnow.com'. My intention was whilst keep focussing on the future, I could also serve professionals (either in teams or self-employed) preparing themselves for the future in many aspects: to regain their vitality, to feel (actually to become) younger, tap into their inner creativity they have lost many years ago, and guide them to use their inborn, natural drive to innovate! We have so much potential!!! My new brand 'Your Future Is Now!' doesn't just allow me to inspire organisations through speeches, it also helps me to empower teams with transition programs and to support individuals in their personal growth to create a better future!Before I could introduce a brand new website based on the existing content, I first had to archive the previous one. Today, it's done! After almost two months of hard work, I have created a well-working archived version of ErwinVanLun.com and prepared the content for the future, making me ready for the future, ready for 'Your Future Is Now!'.
Replaced Shockwave Flash Objects
After I replaced the Flash Header earlier, I have now removed all Flash objects and widgets from the database. Back in 2007 Adobe Shockwave was very popular and I included so called ‘swf’ objects in hundreds of posts. Most of the time, this appeared to be an external hosted video such as YouTube, but in some occasions I had ‘animated logo’ objects in Flash. Independent of their nature, I’ve replaced them all by modern and well supported html/css or mentioned that isn’t longer possible to show previous content. Flash really offered fantastic features that the modern web still can’t offer (at all) in 2019. As a sidenote, I do expect that our future webbrowsers will gain comparable capabilities, but this will take a very long time.
Restored all internal links and repaired pages
Maintaining this website for 15 years, being active especially the first five years on a daily basis, I created 12965 (!!) pages, build dynamically from content rendered from the database with hundreds of links to other pages. Over time, I have moved domains twice and removed and replaced pages in various phases, resulting into an endless number of internal ‘dead links’ (oops, this page is no longer available). That didn’t offer the best user experience at all. For example: in the beginning I had a Dutch ‘trends’ section and many posts in the day2day section kept on linking to pages within this section which obviously lead to 404 errors (page not found). Now, I’ve done whatever I could to link to the most relevant page possible. Although I’ve used quite a number of tools to check and repair them all, it still required a lot of manual work.
Furthermore at the time I introduced the website it was bi-named: ‘Erwin van Lun’s Mensmerk.nl’ for the Dutch pages and ErwinVanLun.com for the English pages. After a while I decided to remove the Dutch pages, except for the ‘day2day observations’. I’ve asked my webdeveloper at that time: ‘just remove them quickly’, and that was what I got: it became a mess: the site concept became crappy and especially the languages switching was totally not intuitive. Therefore, I’ve introduced this little ‘language switcher’ in the tab. By default, it shows you current language, but after 5 seconds it flips and shows the other option; just to erase attention without being annoying.
Also, numerous pages didn’t work at all anymore. For example, the ‘brands’ pages where just showing total different things then they should have done. These pages haven’t probably worked for years! Yet fixed now.
Upgraded ExpressionEngine
In order to upgrade to the latest 5.x edition of my Content Management System ExpressionEngine, I first had to update to the latest 2.x edition, 2.11.9. Reason is that I’d like to synchronise with my other website Chatbots.org first (which runs 2.11.9). I also had to inspect all files in use. Many of them appeared to be used in the past only, or only for Chatbots.org (it used to be one big website in the backend). Cleaning up cleaning up cleaning up. Felt good! 
Archived Mensmerk.nl and ErwinVanLun.com
In my book, I recommended brands to keep a copy of their previous websites. It is important to share where you came from with future generations. So I should set the example. Question remains: what is a good way to achive your past? Well, I’ve created separate ‘code repositories’ which includes all my content and enables me to run a website from the past on my local machine. As this required old technology, it can be vulnerable for security. Therefore, it just runs on my local machine (mac book) and not in public. To make it available to the public audience out there, I generated a ‘flat’ version of the website, just ‘plain html, plain css and plain javascript’. This flattened version doesn’t offer database interactions (forms won’t work for example, just like commenting etc)., but it is VERY fast as it doesn’t have to generate all pages everytime again.
In my case as a futurist, it has another advantage. As you might know, I have predicted quite a few developments that came true (actually all my predictions came true or are about to come true) and can be observed today in reality. Wouldn’t that be an advantage when sharing my thoughts on 2030, 2050 and even 2100? I guess so. I do have a book, but that’s only in Dutch. Having an webarchive serves as a ‘proof’ that I’m the guy with proven future predictions.
I took the opportunity to archive my very first website Mensmerk.nl as well and publish them both, so enjoy the archive of Mensmerk.nl (2005-2007) and ErwinVanLun.com (2007-2019) from now on.
Angular, Chatbots & More
What’s next? Well, obviously: modernise the design, make it responsive, update the content, start sharing my thoughts on daily basis and using Angular (a so-called Javascript framework which allows for VERY interacting features) for an ‘Erwin van Lun chatbot’ and live-integration with my speeches. With an Angular-Chatbot running with many features and content, this website will be awesome again! As I have gained the skills of a professional webdeveloper during the past years, I won’t need to wait for a web developer, get frustrated when not exactly delivered what I want, nor I need to invest loads of money, I can do it myself and gradually. This will be my creative playground!
I have made some minor changes already and add some features shortly. One of them is the login option to allow commenting on the website (using social networks). Once that is fixed, I’ll first move to Chatbots.org to go in maintenance mode there as well, before I’ll come back here and deliver the 2050 experience you can expect from me!