Previous Versions of This Site

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This page details the evolution of this site since its creation in 1994.

Version 1 (1994-1996)

This completely static web site had a grey background and only about twenty pages. There were no photos, as I had no access to a photo scanner at the time. Many of the images were built with Windows Paint and converted to GIF by hand. Probably the most unique feature of this site was a visual class schedule...including what times I would be out of my apartment. (Talk about too much information!)

Depending on where I was at the time, it was hosted on a variety of temporary Linux servers or just posted to a common file share on a Novell 4.x series server. All "development" was done with Microsoft notepad.

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Version 2 (1996-1998)

This was another completely static web page, but it took on an Oriental feel thanks to images pulled from the web and a lot of Photoshop (on a Mac). I also posted personal photos for the first time. And finally, setting up a pattern to hold for years, most of the work was done in a few days toward the beginning of the site's history...actual classwork took up the remainder of my time for the next two years.

This version was always hosted on the Northern Star Systems Linux server, a massive DX66 (16MB RAM), which also served up the Northern Star website (including our early Perl scripts) and mail. Almost all development was performed with Microsoft notepad; content was then uploaded to the web server with FTP.

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Version 3 (1998-2001)

This version preserved the green-and-white look-and-feel from the previous version, but went added dynamic as a Microsoft Frontpage site. (Even at this time, Frontpage could generate custom image buttons.)

This was the first version to be served by a Window NT web server at Standard Networks. At the time, it was the only web-facing box on our DMZ network and it also ran an iMail server. (Standard Networks corporate web site always ran at Supranet , however, so this box was not responsible for that job.)

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Version 4 (2001-2004)

This was easily my most artistic site, and I kind of miss it. The following "version 3->version 4" image provides an example of what I mean.

I abandoned the green-and-white for the first time in five years and went with family photos on the edges of my pages and a great dynamically generated cross-browser pop-up menu system. The home page was a dynamic ASP page which served up quotes and the time and other goodies and several of my pages came to be #1-rated on Google seaches. (e.g. "Bard's Tale")

So, why did I change it? It was fiendishly hard to modify. There was a custom DB application which drove the Javascript navigation menus. There was a "regeneration" step which made static pages out of various configuration settings. There was a "FrontPage clean" step which learned to change FrontPage codes into something useful. All-in-all, it was more trouble than it was worth to update the site. (Thus...no changes AT ALL in 2003!)

Anyway, this site was also hosted by Standard Networks, although FrontPage was no longer part of the configuration.

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Version 5 (2005-2010)

The idea behind this iteration was: SIMPLIFY LIFE FOR THE ADMIN New pages were easy to create, existing pages were easy to change and I could change my site from ANYWHERE as long as ANYWHERE had a browser, text editor and an Internet connection.

The easy-to-create/modify feature mainly came from the use of PHP instead of pregenerated HTML. Each page imported a common header and footer which took care of things like stylesheets, title format, meta format and even "time to generate" statistics. A "blank" page on my site looked like this: 

<?
$_pagetitle = "CHAPTER NAME HERE - PAGE NAME HERE";
include('pageheader.php');
?>
CONTENT HERE
<?  include('pagefooter.php'); ?>

The edit-from-anywhere feature came from the use of a MOVEit DMZ - MOVEit Central system. The entire site was staged on a MOVEit DMZ server, accessible using any web browser, any FTP/SSL client, any FTP/SSH client or any MOVEit file transfer client. MOVEit Central was configured to watch for any additions or changes and move the new files over to actual web site as soon as I was done uploading them to the staging site.

  1. Using any available web browser, sftp or ftps client I sign in to MOVEit DMZ. (I could be sitting anywhere in the world when I do this.) I download the page(s) I want to change and/or create new content and upload the finished content back into MOVEit DMZ using my web browser, sftp or ftps client.
  2. MOVEit DMZ stores my content in its virtual filesystem. (To me, it's just the "people.stdnet.com/jonathan" folder.) The 256-bit AES encryption MOVEit DMZ automatically uses on my files may be overkill, but it ensures that I don't have to worry about source leaks here.
  3. As soon as MOVEit DMZ is done storing each file, MOVEit Central notices that fact, immediately downloads a copy and...
  4. ...saves it into my live content folder on the web server.
  5. Within seconds of the time that I uploaded it into my MOVEit DMZ server, my updated content is available to the general public through my web site.

This site borrowed the "doc" frameset format from MOVEit DMZ's documentation, but each chapter is clickable and opened or closed to reveal or hide pages or more chapters. To allow "global" links which automatically expanded the correct chapter in the tree view, I implemented the table of contents in PHP as well (the original MOVEit DMZ documentation format was plain HTML). Various PHP code modifies the BODY tag depending on the name of the page, and complementary Javascript keeps the associated chapter open during the page load.

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