About this Website

A Little Bit of History

This website’s first incarnation appeared in March 2004 on Geocities. It was a horrible hodgepodge that looked like it had been created by someone who learned HTML in about seven days. 1 I wince when I remember it. Somehow I started hearing of these mythical concepts such as “standards” and “valid HTML” and whatnot. I started using CSS. And I slowly relearned HTML until all of my pages were standards compliant, which is a good thing.

The next step was to learn some sort of programming language that could make my pages more dynamic, such as PHP. If I had only known that it would lead to all of this, then … well, I probably would still have done it anyway. But at least I’d have been warned. As it is, after I began learning PHP I packed my bags and left Geocities for more dynamic pastures.

Adding Some Chrome

I jumped from Geocities to another free web hosting service that supported PHP. Unfortunately, it sucked. So I migrated to Chromehost, which had better service and a friendlier community. For months everything seemed great. I was developing my website and my hosting situation was stable—or was it?

The problem with free web hosting, of course, is that it’s inherently unreliable. Why shouldn’t it be? We unfortunately live in a capitalist society. Now of course there are some exceptions to prove the rule, but otherwise you get what you pay for. I certainly did. Chromehost went under—literally, poof!—and I was left without web hosting.

Toss in A Small Orange

That was it. I had had enough with free web hosting; it was time to up the ante. Fortunately Seth recommended a good, relatively inexpensive hosting company, and in October 2005 I purchased hosting from A Small Orange.

After nearly two years with ASO I have never once been disappointed by the service. The support ticket response time is blazingly fast and courteous. I lack for nothing when it comes to resources and features. The price of my package does not impoverish me, and the servers are stable with very little downtime. In a world where life is full of inconveniences and unfortunate events, ASO is a welcome fluke of karma.2

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Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Often Mistaken for Science

My old website design
The old design of my site, prior to its upgrade.

After I finished VSNS Lemon 4 I gave this website a total overhaul from the engine upward. Now that PHP 4 has reached the end of its life cycle, I’ve switched to PHP 5, and that brings the yummy goodness of OOP. I used to have trouble understanding the concepts of OOP; I tried C and C++, but to no avail. Now, after using it in VSNS Lemon and subsequent projects, I’m glad that I’m finally beginning to comprehend it.

The majority of this site is dynamically generated every time you view page. In fact, this About section is one of the few static pages (and even some parts, like the currently reading section, are dynamic). I pull content from everywhere:

  • My photos are stored on Flickr
  • Twitter supplies my status on my homepage; I update it as often as I can
  • My current reading material comes from Goodreads, which allows me to review books I’ve read and share those reviews with friends
  • I use Google Calendar to keep track of my schedule.
  • Dokuwiki powers my Scripts wiki

The JavaScript goodies I use sparingly are all thanks to jQuery, a brilliant JavaScript library. I can’t do regular JavaScript, and even if I could, writing cross-browser JavaScript is like playing with a live grenade. If you ever have call to use JavaScript, try jQuery. JQuery makes JavaScript easy. And it’s lighter than other JavaScript libraries out there while packing the same punch. 3

Your Document Type Says HTML 4! That’s not XHTML!

I’ve tried HTML and XHTML—I’ve even tried XHTML 1.1, which requires content negotiation to serve to Internet Explorer. 4 Now I hear that HTML 5 is in the works, which just makes my head spin. Things like this make me glad I decided not to try and become a professional web developer.

When redesigning this site, I decided to use HTML 4 to avoid the XHTML quandary instead of XHTML 1.1. Why the switch? Well, I was just tired of jumping through so many successively narrower hoops to get my website to work properly in different browsers. The benefits of having a shiny X in front of the HTML did not outweigh the work involved. XHTML 2 may be the future, but I will wait until it is the present, since the future is not now. And with HTML 5 lurking beneath the surface of web standards, even XHTML’s place is not assured. So as with the DVD format wars, I will wait to see which emerges as the victor. Until then, HTML 4 works.

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Footnotes

  • 1 That’s because it was a hodgepodge that had been created by someone who learned HTML in about seven days.
  • 2 I really really hope that I’m not jinxing myself with this.
  • 3 Not that I’ve tried other JavaScript libraries. I’ve downloaded some, though, and many have been huge for something a browser has to cache. But I’m sure they were great libraries.
  • 4 Internet Explorer doesn’t support the application/xhtml+xml content-type. XHTML 1.1 requires this content-type to be correctly displayed, so I used content negotiation to recognize an IE browser and serve HTML 4 instead.

Prepare for LUDICROUS SPEED!