The code library was started in 1996 way back when the web was young, and I was (well... most people were) pretty new at HTML. It started really as a big long text file, and some bookmarks to the 'cool' things that I found on the web, or in a book, etc. that I thought I might use at some point.
The site has been through many iterations, and I'm very proud to say that in the first 8 months of 2000 we have just short of a half million hits. I know... I know.. .that's not a lot... but still.. it's not bad considering I did this site mostly for me, and I've never once submitted to a search engine. In August of 2000, we had visitors from: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Denmark, Singapore, New Zealand, Jordan, Brazil, Japan, Norway, India, Argentina, Malaysia, and Switzerland. Not bad if I do say so myself!
The one item that got this whole movement going? The Meta-Refresh tag. One of those things that you don't use that often, but when you need it... you just can't quite remember the syntax. You'll also notice that the code library crosses several different technologies from straight HTML, to images, JavaScript to ASP. I can honestly say that I've used about 95% of these items on one project or another. The home page started out as just a flat list of files, what a pain in the neck! Then I used the FrontPage Table of Contents BOT to facilitate the building of the home page, now, in it's Y2K makeover, it is entirely database driven, even down to adding pages to be searched. Yes... I built my own search engine... because Index server is a pain, the FP Search BOT is a pain.. I even tried the 'personalized' version of Google... but since it doesn't have all my pages indexed... what good is that?
So a little chronological history:
1996 - A bunch of text files, things ripped out of magazines, and a few good bookmarks
1997 - my first 'real' web site... on GeoCities. Not a great first attempt.. we've come a long way baby!
September 16, 1998 - Registered psacake.com and started hosting with ADDR.Com .. not a bad deal, $8 / month, FrontPage extensions.. everything that I wanted at the time.
January 1999 - 8,698 visitors
March 1999 - 23,253 visitors! - Someone made a reference to the site in the FrontPage Newsgroup.
August 1999 - Time to renew the contract for ADDR.com... I don't think so.. I want to do some ASP stuff, so after doing a ton of research... we move to Interland.. with a big bump in price, up to $20 / month. But it had everything!
January 2000 - 58,535 visitors!
June 2000 - Finally... I get a cable modem in my house. This is broadband.. this is the way! NEVER going back to dialup - that's for damn sure.
July 2000 - The contract is up with Interland... I move psacake.com to a dedicated box under my desk.. connected to the cable modem! Sign up with TZO to provide dynamic DNS.
August 2000 - 60, 685 visitors! We're averaging over 2,000 hits a day!
The most popular page? Lookup who an IP address belongs to with 1,025 views in August.
Ok.. some much needed updates to the "history". I've all but eliminated FrontPage from the mix, I still use it for some things.. but most of this site is ASP and dynamically built, FP just gets in the way. All of the pages consist of about 6 pages total. I'm making heavy use of includes for Navigation, Metatags, branding etc.
A little hardware update... well.. there's really not much to update, I haven't changed any hardware, but we've added a whole lot of software. TZO is no longer providing DNS services to us, now we are using Zone Edit to manage DNS, and so should you. We are using Direct Update to update Zone Edit dynmically. We've all but removed Access from the mix, and we mostly use SQL server now. Much faster, much more stable, pain in the butt to backup! Coming soon the .NET framwork, and some asp.net work.
Tools Update - still using Direct Update, but these days it's updating xPertDNS. Both rock solid products!
Thanks for visiting, we appreciate it, and please come back soon!