What ever happened to that simianuprising.com website?

TL:DR; After 22 years of faithful service as my homepage domain, I’ve redirected simianuprising.com to the more professional-sounding jerclarke.org. The site still exists, and all the old URLs should still work, but they’ll all point to my current and future home on the web, jerclarke.org.

Oh wait maybe that’s all I had to say. Ok, I love you bye bye, thanks for reading 🙏🏻

What’s that? You want to know more?

You’re in the tiny group of people who were in some way a “fan” of “Simian Uprising” and want a recap of the various phases and designs of the site over the years?

January 2003: Ungrateful Biped

The original version of the site was called “Ungrateful Biped”. It was published in January 2003 and hosted for free at ungratefulbiped.wronger.com.

It was a “journal comic”, about things that happened in my life. I drew, scanned, colored, and uploaded a strip every single day for many months, before eventually petering off when I started having both university and a job.

If I’m honest, this is the best design I have ever created.

I drew it out on paper with a sharpie, then scanned it and used tables and an image map to lay it out in HTML. Each day I duplicated the HTML file from the previous day to add a new strip into the “archive”. If I wanted to change something about the “website”, I had to manually edit every single HTML file separately over FTP. Those were the days.

The screenshot above is a good example of my early work, absolutely raw and unskilled. I was not good at drawing in any way, but I tried (and succeeded) at tricking myself into learning by practicing every day and publishing my work.

You can still read the Ungrateful Biped comic, and notably it still lives on simianuprising.com via the subdomain ub.simianuprising.com. I actually own ungratefulbipded.org, so hope to some day re-build the original design there.

April 2003: Simian Uprising hand-coded HTML

Later in 2003, while I was still releasing the comic, I got sick of the limitations of the free hosting at wronger.com and bought simianuprising.com to act as my homepage, with “Ungrateful Biped” as the main project within “Simian Uprising”.

“Simian”, of course, refers to primates, including humans, monkeys, and other apes. I think what I meant by it, at the time, was a kind of primal need for revolution, an awakening driven by acceptance of our natural selves. Something along those lines… I had recently discovered magic mushrooms.

To be honest, at that point in my life I had never interacted with actual monkeys. Now that I’ve spent some “quality time” with various macaques in India, Cambodia, and elsewhere, I can’t help thinking I wouldn’t have gone for this concept 😅

The screenshot above is a good example of the evolution of my art style. By this point I had upgraded from drawing directly with a sharpie, to penciling then inking with a sharpie, to inking with fancy art pens, and finally to drawing directly with a Wacom tablet, which is the style you see above.

March 2004: Simian Uprising Movable Type upgrade

As the comic strips got more and more sparse I had also acquired a Fujifilm digital camera, a real luxury at the time, and was posting photos most days below the latest comic strip, which would often remain the same for days or weeks on end.

By early 2004 the webcomic was on permanent hiatus and the site had evolved into a photo-blog, so I installed Movable Type, which was the style at the time for people who wanted to install their own blogs. The design, as seen above, was a simple modification of the default theme to add a custom banner at the top. I didn’t stick with Movable Type long enough for this one to evolve into something prettier.

December 2004: Finally a WordPress site

By the end of 2004 I had already migrated from Movable Type to WordPress, due to a weird pricing fiasco that caused almost everyone on MT to migrate that year. This was the golden age of my “blog”, with fairly regular photo posts as well as a bunch of angsty news and memes and all the other blog stuff.

Have to say, this design really sings to my heart. Yeah, it’s from a very specific era, but the header artwork literally screams, and the militaristic use of color and fonts tells a story that goes perfectly with the “Simian Uprising” concept.

It was also my first “web nerd” design project, with “valid XHTML” and a CSS-based layout. The sidebar even had all those little 8-bit badges to brag about it. This was also when I first started using PHP and learning the power of actual scripting.

I built this theme starting from the default templates of the time, which had no name, they were just the PHP files that came with WordPress, but later came to be known as the “Classic” theme. Here’s another link about the Classic theme with more screenshots. This was WordPress 1.2, you must understand, back before we had fancy things like “themes”, or “pages”.

2013: Responsive refresh

At some point I clearly realized that it was time to make the site mobile-responsive, and in the process de-emphasize the “blog” which had started getting updates very, very sporadically. Keeping the central themes from the 2005 design, this one added widgets at the top to introduce me and add some up-to-dateness in the form of my Twitter feed. Looking back now, something was definitely lost compared to the 2005 version, but it looked clean and worked well on your phone.

2017: New default theme

In 2017 I wanted to get rid of everything that said “Jeremy” (see About Jer and Gender) and figured I’d modernize my site in the process. This version was a pretty straight implementation of the Twenty Seventeen default WordPress theme of the era, though with some extra widgets added at the top to introduce myself.

Despite surely being the most boring of the bunch design-wise, it looked professional and let me integrate that huge photo of the Philippine long-tailed macaque I photographed while visiting Cebu in 2015. Something about the combination of the look on her face and the dreamy bokeh in the background signaled, to me, a transition away from the concept of “Uprising”, even if the “Simian” element was still going strong.

2025: jerclarke.org

And thus we find ourselves here. It’s November 2025 and for the first time in 19 years, I’m looking for work, so I figured I’d start by refreshing this site and giving it the professional domain name I’ve had registered but unused for many years now, jerclarke.org.

It wasn’t a decision I took lightly. “Simian Uprising” is a big part of who I am, and it was a link to a lot of great memories. At the same time, it’s not a vibe I’m going for anymore, and having a vanity domain of my full chosen name is a lot easier for new people I meet to work with than a long mix of strange words. Boy, am I tired of spelling out s-i-m-i-a-n-u-p-r-i-s-i-n-g-dot-com over the phone!

While I was updating the site, I figured I should also update the theme, which was clearly showing its age 8 years later. As in 2017, I started by asking myself if I could make the current default WordPress theme, Twenty Twentyfive, work, and so far, so good.

Things have changed a lot over these 20 years. Twenty Twentyfive is a “Block Theme”, meaning you can use the “Full Site Editor” to edit everything about your site without touching a line of code. What a nightmare. I took this project as a challenge to learn the new system, which I’ve avoided for several years now, and wound up enjoying the process. I have my doubts about using the Full Site Editor “as intended”, gooping up your layout and HTML by clicking around, but I figured out a workflow that lets me store all the formatting in PHP and JSON files in the theme, so the visual editor is mostly just a quick way to prototype ideas. I hope to write more about that experience soon.

So there you have it! 22 years of the same website, 7 major redesigns, 3 different domain names, and 1 lazy web creator who always forgets to post.

If you have fond memories of Ungrateful Biped or Simian Uprising, please leave a comment and remind me!

Appendix 1: Archive.org WayBackMachine Links

• Apr 17 2003: Mostly-broken early version of hand-coded simianuprising.com
• Jun 10 2003: The header is visible, but the comic is broken.
• Nov 2004 Same hand-coded design as previous link, but you can get a sense of how I had started using it as a photo blog.
• Mar 2005: Simian Uprising running Movable type, though sadly the header image isn’t visible
• Jan 2005: First snapshot with WordPress, though no formatting available so we can’t see if the theme was the same as later snapshots.
• Dec 03 2005: First one where screaming monkey WordPress theme is visible. No widgets at the top for twitter/GV
• Dec 11 2013: Updated responsive version of screaming monkey design with three widgets at the top and sidebar on right
• Aug 29 2017: First sighting of Twenty Seventeen child theme, along with About Jer and Gender posted Aug 5, but with rendering issues. Sep 11 2017 has good visualization of the theme and widgets.