Jing DNB website
The Jing DNB blog, once upon a time the main source for news about drum and bass music in Beijing.
The Jing DNB website was a blog I made in 2005 (or thereabouts) and operated semi-anonymously until about 2011.
It was the main (also only) source for drum ‘n’ bass news in Beijing, and featured news, updates, and flyers for dnb parties and related events in Beijing, plus photos and ‘regular-ish Beijing area drum and bass info by email’.
I shut down the site in 2011 because keeping it updated wasn’t sparking joy, for various reasons.
But I kept it all online because it’s a record of a bunch of fun times in mid-to-late ’00s Beijing.
Take a scroll through the posts and flyers—go on, you know you want to.
You’ll see a whole lot of Syndicate DNB events and DJs, which makes sense, as the Syndicate were the main crew doing dnb in Beijing.
It’s not all Syndicate, though—the flyers show the other Beijing-based promoters and events that featured dnb DJs, including Yen/o2culture, Baicai, Science of Sounds, China Vibe Live, Great Wall parties (including the infamous “Wild orgies leave the Great Wall in mess, and tears” party [Photos]), the MIDI Music Festival, and the Modern Sky Music Festival.
And how about all the nightclubs that opened and closed? Mix, Vics, Club Fusion, Cargo, Tango, Top Club, Cloud 9, Zub, Q Bar, White Rabbit, Yugongyishan, Mao Live, China Doll, Club Obiwan, Lantern, Star Live, 2 Kolegas.
See all the posts and flyers and photos in the Jing DNB site archives.
‘Tech stack’
‘Tech stack’ is in quotes because there wasn’t really a tech stack involved.
Jing DNB was a custom-coded PHP site, and it worked a little bit like the static site generators that were so popular in … 2017? … except without the final step that generated and deployed the actual static site.
So not really an ahead-of-its-time static site generator.
(By the way: what’s a polite way to ask someone if they do crossfit use a static site generator for their website? You don’t need to ask; they’ll tell you.)
Anyway. Here’s how the site did work.
Each ‘post’ was a tiny PHP file that contained the HTML for the post and a little bit of metadata.
When the site loaded, those little PHP files were looped through and printed to the page using an immortal script I got from Mazza [0][1] back when I first started making websites.
On the homepage there was a list of the 8 latest posts, and all the rest went into a separate archives page. I eventually would have had to add pagination if I hadn’t quit updating it, but YAGNI amirite?
The email updates mailing list was also operated ‘in-house’, with another script that looped through the list of email addresses and used PHP’s mail() function to send emails in batches small enough for me to not get in trouble with the webhost.
[0] I’m still using versions of this script.
[1] Y’all know guess the name.
Design
The design and programming was extremely 2005, except for maybe the Jing DNB sharp teeth guy.
And here’s what the site looks like on the old Dell D600, the same laptop I used to make the Jing DNB website (amongst others) back in 2005.
