The primary reason why I have created this website isn’t so much for me to publish content for the world to see, but to organize my content in a rational and permanent way that supplements the memories in my head. Certainly I’ll post photos, videos, and write posts (like this one) as part of a conversation with my friends, but the goal is to backup my brain when it fails in its recall duties. This site is the culmination of years of planning and many fruitless efforts.
As a kid, I linked my Commodore 64 to my Dad’s 386 PC clone by connecting 2400 baud modems through the 2nd pair of the home phone line. Using Kermit, I stored my video games and my original & transcribed, hand-typed BASIC programs onto my Dad’s enormous, 60 MEGAbyte hard drive: HUGE! Between this and being a frequent visitor of the 305 area code BBS’s, I learned very early on the importance of proper digital data storage and organization.
My first website site was in 1994 on UF’s Grove network, where I had a simple FTP system that relied on complicated directory tree structures and pre-formatted HTML templates. It looked very similar to a newsgroup threads, but it was boring, inefficient and required some labor to get right. Subsequent attempts were on other UF servers, an Mindspring site, a Vector.net site, and various free hosting services. Since the early 2000’s, I’ve relied upon the generosity of my friend, Guido Garcia to host this site on PreventiveITGroup servers at Terremark’s NAP of the Americas.
I’m not bad when it comes to graphic design, but I’ve never had time to become proficient at HTML, CSS, and the other coding skills required to develop a good website. I experimented with online blogging services such as Slashdot, Blogspot, and Wordpress.com, etc, but wanted to insure that my data was on my own machine, not somewhere in the aether.
Mike Anello’s excellent implementation of DRUPAL for the Microgravity Research and Education Center website awakened me to SQL based content management systems. His work, plus NASA CoLab’s impressive site and module development convinced me to go with DRUPAL. PreventiveTech hosts their websites on Windows IIS, so I quickly found myself mired in configuration problems and other issues. After two years of efforts, DRUPAL proved too immature of a platform for a simpleton like me.
Ariel Waldman re-awakened me to Wordpress when she pointed out that it could be installed locally. In my hard-headed insistence on making DRUPAL work, I failed to realize the difference between Wordpress.COM and Wordpress.ORG. (Even today Wordpress.com does not adequately inform the user of the .org alternative). I painlessly installed & set it upand I have finally been able to focus on delivering content instead of wasting time deciphering code.
And with that, the real fun can begin!