madhabits.com

madhabits was an anonymous personal blog I wrote from scratch in PHP around 2009–2010 — a separate little engine from Fusion, built just for me to write into. It had no name on it on purpose. The tagline said the quiet part out loud: "~ a place where i can share my true feelings ~."

The look is the whole point. Every line of text is laid out in a <pre> block and framed on both sides with random hexadecimal digits, tinted in shades of the active theme — a hex-dump / Matrix aesthetic that I was clearly very proud of. A theme switcher in the footer flipped the whole thing between reddish, blueish, greenish, and nullsoft palettes (it defaults to deep red). There was a custom login, an RSS feed, and pagination — all hand-rolled, including a gloriously naive bit of “security” where SQL apostrophes were escaped by swapping them for ||.

The page above is the homepage rebuilt from the original theme files and the recovered database, recovered from my 2012 server backup. The hex framing is generated by a faithful re-implementation of the original line() / makebg() routines — quirks and all: a switch-statement fall-through bug in the original meant the “hex” digits can only ever be 0–9 or F, and the reconstruction reproduces exactly that. Use the theme switcher; it still works.

A note on what’s preserved here

This was a private journal, and it had teeth. The very first post opened with some crude framing and a dark throwaway line about self-harm — both trimmed here (MUSEUM-FIX) per the museum’s content policy. What remains is the part actually worth keeping: a genuinely odd, funny, self-aware riff on anonymity, solipsism, and posting into the void as “an emergent super intelligence.” The full posts survive in my private backups; the museum keeps the site, its design, and the voice.