I say "Life Work" simply because I've been creating websites for some time now. This website is the ever evolving website I've had since I first started, re-designed, moved, given up on, and reborn. It's been on a dozen different ISP's and several of my own boxes. I even had a Linux box for a while that would keep my internet connection on 24/7. If it saw that I lost my dialup, it would re-dial and send me an e-mail so I could get my new IP address.

Web development for me started in 1994 when having a 28.8kbs modem was common. It was hosted on the ISP that I had at the time. It was pretty typical of personal websites of its day. It was made using a text editor, and a web browser to check my work. I cannot even remember which browser it was. It was before IE. It was pretty limited, so I made the website to keep track of my links. As time went on, some other editors were used, including FrontPage, but, ironically, I'm back to the text editor. Notepad++ is my current favorite.

I was thinking the other day of all the ISP's I've had over they years, and here's what I can remember:

• Concentric.net - They are still in business. I think I switched because my dial-up connection started getting flaky. I honestly don't remember.
• Voyager.net - They were bought out by someone else. I was with them for all of a week. I switched because the ISP I really wanted became available in my area (remember, it was all about finding one with a local dial-up number).
• Iserv.net - They are a local company that's still in business. I had them until the ISP's in my area started offering the coveted X2 (56k) dialup access and they didn't at the time.
• X2.Alliance.net - They got bought out by my next ISP.
• WMIS - They are a local company that's still in business. I had them until the local phone companies started offering DSL for a few bucks more than what I was paying for dial-up. It was a no brainer.
• Ameritech - DSL started to become available to the masses for cheap prices, so I jumped on it. This is when I started my own domain, and was using DynDNS to manage my domain. Since I was on DSL, my IP address would change from time to time and I wrote a script that would check my IP address and update my DNS record if it changed and then send me a text message. Ameritech would later be bought out by my next ISP.
• AT&T - They bought Ameritech. Soon after the switch, they started bouncing my e-mails since I was using their mail servers to bounce my mail through. Since the domain on my end didn't match theirs, they blocked it. So I moved on.
• 100 Megs Web Hosting - It wasn't my ISP, but where I had my site hosted after the AT&T blunder. This place was recommended to me by a friend. I had moved the entire site over to their servers when they shut it down. It seems that one of my scripts got caught in a loop and was hogging their resources on their server. So instead of killing the task and contacting me, the completely shut my site down. I was down for 3 days. Not happy at all.
• WMIS - Haven't we been here before? WMIS offered me a static IP for a few dollars more than what I was already paying for DSL through AT&T which fixed a lot of issues for me. I had my website back on my box, so I could do whatever I wanted. Looking back on it now, I now pay twice as much as I was for dial-up for 208 1/3 times the bandwidth. Not bad.

In the middle of all this, I got my amateur radio license, and started to get involved in a local club. Having gotten involved in a local club, I started their first website (I stopped at the end of 2003). Someone asked if we could have a guestbook, and I found one written in this strange language called PERL. Since I didn't want the guestbook to look like the example, I started editing this PERL script. I was hooked. PERL was easy for me to pick up. I've written many a script with it since then, which is interesting since it was over 5 years later before a book was actually purchased. Many scripts were added to the website - a calendar, an online swap meet, a discussion board, and my own admin tools for the site. This website was starting to grow and so I wanted to get some of the other members of the group to edit the website so that I could have more free time.

Sometime later, having parted ways from the group, I started working on my own site. Some of the scripts were re-written to fit my own needs. The calendar was actually something that Matt Kruse came up with. He used to offer the calendar for free, later it became a commercial thing, and one day it just disappeared from his site entirely. When I downloaded it, it did not do re-occurring events. The code was modified so that it would, so that the same monthly events would not have to be entered into every month. The script has been hacked so much that there is almost none of the original code left. It used to keep its data in a plain text file on the server, now it's in a MySQL database.

MySQL was introduced to me when a co-worker showed me it's features. At the time I was working on some MS Access databases. Since the query language was very similar, it wasn't much of a stretch to start playing with MySQL. It can be manipulated with MS Access using the OBDC connector that you can get from their site, or simply with the tools that they offer. MS Access was used to manipulate the site, but now I like to MySQL tools so much I use them instead. Much of the site's content and data is stored in the database now. It has allowed me to create my own tools to maintain the site remotely using nothing more than a web browser.

Since amateur radio was still a part of my life, and I was active in some of the local groups, I got involved in Skywarn. Skywarn is an organization that supports the National Weather Service and local agencies to aid in weather spotting and reporting different weather conditions. The group that I am involved in actually goes to the NWS office in Grand Rapids to take these reports from the 23 counties that the GRR office serves. Their webmaster moved out of town, so I took over the site. It now resides here.

Having my own server has given me the flexibility to create things that I've would not normally have if the site was hosted on someone else's machine. When the ability to have the images for the local radar on my machine became a need, rather than relying on the NWS's servers, a script was made that monitors their site and downloads the pictures here. Using Imagemagick, a script was made to make the thumbnail pictures you see to your left. Since PERL has some excellent tools for parsing text, a script for gathering weather statements was easy to make. Since a MySQL server was at my disposal, I was able to keep track of the events. Having that gave me the ability to set up mailing lists that people can subscribe to so that they can be notified when new statements were issued. While other hosting servers limited you on how much e-mail is sent out, or how many mailing lists one can setup, my only limitation was the bandwidth.

A friend of mine, who runs one of the local volunteer groups, liked some of the features of this site. He too likes to be informed as to what's going on. He's made several requests for features to be added to the site, which I've added, time permitting. His group, and others from other counties now use my server to get their weather related information whenever it changes, all automatically. I still find it cool that the server does all this automatically. I also made a script that downloads the FCC database and notifies you of the day to day changes for the local counties. On the first of the month, it sends you a complete list for your county.

Lately the new toy I've been playing with is Map data. Google Maps opened up a new world for anyone who ever wanted to play in the GIS world. While traveling, we've been keeping track of the Lat/Lon data for all of the lighthouses we've visited.

Recently, I downloaded data using a PERL module to create a database of all the Lat/Lon information of all the 2006 Census data. Having that, gives me the ability for you to look up a callsign and have it produce a Google Map showing you exactly where they live. It's not fool proof though. If the address is a PO Box, or if the Census taker entered that data incorrectly, then the address either doesn't show up, or its in the wrong spot.

The downside to Google Maps is that if you want to customize a Google Map, knowledge of JavaScript is strongly suggested. I don't like JavaScript, mainly because it behaves differently in different browsers. It's also asynchronous. This means that if you have a loop running, and if the code after the loop is dependent on the loop being finished, then it's going to be a little more involved, you see, it won't wait for the loop to finish before continuing on. It's not impossible to work with, it just makes things a little more difficult from what I am used to.

So there you go. Poke around, check out the weather stuff. If you like the weather stuff, either subscribe to a list, or check out the RSS feeds. Most of my work is done in the winter, when the weather here is not pleasant. When it gets warmer, my attention is turned to camping with the family. We're going to try backpacking (camping with only what we can carry) this year, so I'll be preparing for that whenever the time is available.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy some of the hard work that is put into this site.