Hosting
This site is currently hosted by a company called b-one who are, I think, based in Denmark. They offer very decent hosting packages and I can recommend them without reservation, although I've found the support emails often attain a level of terseness which can be unsettling. They are a very efficient helpdesk though - I've never waited for more than eighteen hours for a fix.

Tech
For those of you of a technical disposition, this site is hosted on linux servers running the Apache webserver with ASP pages being handled by the Sun One ASP server.

Having worked as an ASP developer (I’m now working in .NET) for a number of years I prefer it to PHP which is also available on my hosting plan. Currently LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) development is very popular, but I find that working with that kit involves spending 80% of your time configuring/tweaking the OS and environment. In fact I strongly suspect that the popularity of this particular development platform has more to do with the considerably lower costs involved in Open Source software than the superiority of these technologies over say Java or indeed .NET.

On a related note I recently (Aug this year) began working as a developer in .NET, using C# and I must confess that I’m actually very taken with it despite my feelings towards Micro$**t, who I have despised for many years. (For reasons ranging from their snidey/evil business practices to the poor quality of their software products).

Aaanyway, as a longtime Java phreak I took to C# like a pig to erm, a lovely trough of swill. Largely because C# is to Java what J# is to JavaScript viz a late-arriving and obvious clone. There’s a lot of guff about 'common language runtime' and language specifications but in actual fact M$ have built up mountains of hype around something which is essentially Java and a virtual machine.

Equipment
The following kit was used to produce this site:

• Apple Powerbook G4
• Apple Macintosh OSX 10.4
• Sony VAIO GRT786 Laptop
• Windows XP Professional
• Olympus C50 digital stills camera
• Wacom Intuos Graphics Tablet
• Adobe Photoshop CS
• Adobe ImageReady

Database
b-one's hosting package includes a couple of MySQL instances. As databases go MySQL is perfectly usable but lacks professional/enterprise features like stored procedures and triggers that you‘d find in Oracle or SQL Server. The databases are which are administerable through the surprisingly good phpMyAdmin web tool which offers pretty much all the functionality of something like TOAD or MS Enterprise Manager [albeit without fancy stuff like ER diagramming] over the web.

Much of this site is data-driven and uses ASP and ADO to build pages around content retrieved from MySQL. The most obvious examples are perhaps the blog and the guestbook pages. For an introduction to ADO/ASP and their .NET incarnations please refer to the very excellent w3schools website.

How These Pages are Built.

It all starts with a template...

1. Page is requested.