This Web Site

Since its beginnings, the web site has evolved as I learned HTML more and learned how to better design web pages. There is not much here that would be of interest to a random stranger, but I think that anyone who knows me will like the site...or will at least find that it is entertaining in instances of extreme boredom. In any case, this is not designed to be overly fancy, professional or purpose-driven. :-)

I made my first web site back in 1996. I originally made the web site both to learn about web development technologies and to post some of my artwork somewhere. As time permits, I continue to use this site mainly to explore technologies.

Technical Notes

I spent quite a few years doing my own web design on this site by hand - writing HTML, JavaScript, PHP, AJAX (my own, not using one of the now-popular libraries), and more. All of that has helped me understand what is really going on behind the scenes, but modern web development environments and technologies have come a long way since 1996, when I started this web site, and now offer an immense wealth of capabilities. My day job involves little web development (besides web services), so this is how I keep alive my knowledge of the various technologies.

After doing my own web design by-hand for many years, in spring of 2009, I switched to Microsoft technologies at my web server. My day job involved C++/C# in Visual Studio, so I was very familiar with the environment, and I had done some tinkering with ASP.NET, as well. I found that many of the things I had arduously written by hand are built into either ASP.NET or the free, open-source ASP AJAX Control Toolkit. These, combined with Visual Studio Express (free version of Microsoft's standard evelopment environment), give a rich feature set and greatly ease development versus writing it all by hand.

At that time, I realized that with the minimal free time that I spend working on the site, and with my background and expertise in Microsoft development technologies, it was time for me to shift away from Apache/linux hosting to a Microsoft platform and recreate what I had written in PHP/JavaScript anew (that turned out to be easy). Linux and open-source technologies still have a place in my heart (and home).