Colophon

This site has been active on the internet since 1997. It’s gone through many different iterations of technology. Although I had wanted a web site before this time, I was determined to never learn a thing about HTML as a language. So I started out using FrontPage, because I thought it would shield me from that. Oh how wrong I was. The bad news was that it took about a month of using the tool to get fed up with it’s limitations and start using the source code view to edit my pages directly. The good news was that HTML is the absolute least of a programmer’s or a designer’s worries when putting together a web site.

At this point, I had been using a Sprynet dialup account for internet access from home. I had a second phone line put in (of course!), but then I figured out how to setup my computer at work with NT to support having two modems joined together for an aggregate connection. So I would access my work computer, and use their T1 for internet connectivity. I was getting 56Kbps with a couple of old 28.8K modems long before 56K modems started being available.

Sprynet became Mindspring, and their quality of service went from perfect to intolerable within months.

• I could no longer send email unless I dialed into Sprynet’s POP, ruining the speed advantage of using two modems.
• Further, I could no longer send mail to more than 10 people at once. That’s a fine idea considering all the spam out there, but I was trying to run a small mailing list of about 100 people. Working around this was painful.
• I could no longer use the Microsoft Web Publishing wizard to push my web files to Sprynet’s web server, which was proprietary anyway. I could only use FTP. Oh, and by the way, if there are any problems with that, you were forced to use WS_FTP, a non-free program, or you couldn’t receive technical support. (And there are lots of problems.)
• They switched me to a new POP. Which, after resolving numerous glitches in getting connected, I found just plain stunk. The modem bank was slow and prone to dropping connections.
• And don’t even get me started about their “technical support.” It was terrible. Every time I tried to use it, I was treated like someone who has never seen a computer.

So I decided to take out a domain name and make a real, hosted site at the current address, and ditched Mindspring for Interland. They were just fine, if a little slow at support.

I have to confess to some trepidation on taking out the domain name of davidkrider.com, as I realize that I’m not the only one in the world with that name and that particular spelling. I also realize I’m not the only David Krider who’s found his way onto the web. But, if I was going to make this move, as someone who does a lot of “work” through my personal account, I wasn’t going to have to make everyone change their addresses more than once. Now I will always be able to be reached at this domain, and no matter how many times I change internet connections or service providers, I will not have to make a broadcast to everyone I know that I have moved.

Vectris started offering DSL in my area, and it was the first broadband I could get. I jumped at the chance, and get a 512K symmetric line. Getting a fixed IP address was an extra $5/mo, so I began using myself as my provider. By this time, I had moved to using Linux on all my home servers, but I was still stuck on using FrontPage for the site, so I became knowledgeable about how to use the extensions on Apache.

The DSL company went bankrupt, and I moved my site to WebSiteSource while I waited for cable access to come to my area. It was over 2 (agonizing) more years before Comcast finally turned that on around here. However, according to the restrictive ToS, you can’t host anything on their consumer-level service. Since I don’t want to pay for business-class service (which drops a couple of times a year at my church anyway), I passed on it and got DSL again through MWISP. That lasted until I moved into my current house, where I finally got cable, and stopped hosting my own site.

Somewhere along this line, I rewrote my web site in PHP. And it worked great. It was very fast. To be honest, though, I gave up some things about FrontPage that were (still) very useful. There’s nothing I can find in the *nix world of web development that compared to FrontPage’s ability to sift out broken links and unused graphics files in a site. It’s all scripts and hackery in Linux-land, and I’ve not taken the time to do a thorough cleaning for a long, long time.

At the time, it was a “half-blown” PHP application. Though it was all served out of a database, I still had to edit the content manually, and then upload it. During the rewrite, I moved to using the Smarty template system over top of my application, and had made it possible to edit pages in place on the server. While there were some advantages, I hit a brick wall with the security model. Since there’s just one user to authenticate, I didn’t want to write a real authentication system. I just wanted to continue using HTTP auth methods. However, I just couldn’t make protecting my admin pages in a subdirectory (with a custom .htaccess file) work with Smarty (and my way of including common headers and footers), so I gave up, and the site sat untouched for another two years.

Then, I got a new job, and learned to use Ruby on Rails for a programming project. Naturally, I got a wild hair, and rewrote the site. In fact, adapting all the data in the database to be Rails “friendly,” rewriting all of the programming, and getting a new hosting provider and setting everything up, probably only took about 22 hours. That may or may not seem like a small amount of time to some people, but I contrast that to the fact that I had taken weeks to rewrite this thing in Smarty before I got stuck. It was basically just a “deep dive” over a busy weekend. SmarterLinux didn’t do RoR, so I switched to HostingRails.

Then, a year and a half later, I got another wild hair — out of nowhere — and revamped the site with WordPress. That’s where I sit today.

I eagerly await the day I can spend $100/mo with the cable company to host my own site again.

Real Men Use VI