My old website was pretty good: it did the job and I was quite proud of it. But it was hosted directly on the internet, on a computer that was barely alive – a disaster waiting to happen. Rather than let some hacker/hardware failure decide the fate of my website, I chose to make that decision myself. I killed it, but froze the brain for future generations to revive.
You see my problem, don’t you? I had to sacrifice my website for the security of the network, and the robustness of future websites. It died so that others might live, and live to be stronger.
Most of the hardware rotated into the new firewall, and an image of the hard disk lives in my RAID. I have got the old website running – but only on wintermute, which cannot publish to the world. You look at this website, and see that it is not looking too good, and not doing too much either. The reason is that I am re-writing it from scratch, and when I started I didn’t know how to use the tools. I still know practically nothing, but I occasionally manage to work out a way of doing what I would like. It is a stimulating challenge, facing SQL Server and .NET Framework (VB and C#) with nary a clue.
This night I made a breakthrough in the Photo Management app (I am writing WinForms apps to manage the content) so you may expect an actual photo section Real Soon Now.