new name, new host

June 24, 2005 &bull site

Welcome to the new and somewhat improved mps75.net. As you can tell, I’ve changed the domain name (and URL) of the site from mps75.com to mps75.net. While I’d like to say there was some grand vision behind this decision, I can’t. The site you are looking at is being hosted with a new company and it was simply much easier to set up a new domain name with them when I created my account rather than transferring the domain name from my old hosting company. So, without further ado, let’s talk about what’s going on here.

First of all everything you see on this site has been hand-coded using a text editor. There’s no doubt I could reproduce this site using a blogging package and it would probably have more bells and whistles and look a whole lot better. But my primary goal for mps75.net is to learn some things about creating a web site. I want to learn the ins and outs of XML, PHP, MySQL, and CSS. While I’m sure I would learn some of this using MoveableType or something similar, I guess I wanted the challenge to come up with something from scratch. (For the record, my secondary goal is to produce something that our friends and family will enjoy reading — or at least something that will keep them up-to-date on what Heidi and I are doing. In case you’re still reading, my third goal is to improve my writing skills.)

The old site, mps75.com, used ASP with an Access backend. The new site, mps75.net, has been ported over to PHP with a MySQL backend. The links are stored in MySQL and are generated on the fly. Most of the content is in XML files, which are also being pulled into your browser dynamically as you navigate from page to page. This is (finally) allowing me to keep all of the site content in a few XML files; I’m simply writing different PHP pages to display it in different spots and in different formats. Welcome to 1999, I guess.

What’s next? RSS for sure. Possibly an update to the gallery. And hopefully more content. Thanks for visiting.

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