Time line and History

Timeline and history of yeroc.us and its predecessors. A progression of web design, programming, and experimentation.

2002

March - Registration of deerfield.com DNS2Go name "cbll.myip.org"
March 28 - First serving of a web page from my home computer.
April - Set up of web server (Genesis) on old Windows 98 Pentium box.
May - First wide-scale distribution of web page by my server (a school project)
May - I heavily advertised my humble site to people from school. They all signed the Guest book, which was run with a simple Perl script. It was an elegantly simple system, far removed from the fancy database-storage systems we use today.
June - Apache replaces vqServer as the HTTP software.
June 18 - Our cable internet service provider, cuts off incoming requests to port 80. I had to switch the server to port 8400, for the time being.
July - CBLLProfile profile for AIM launched.
June 21 - First Outhouse (CIRadio) live radio show.
September 29 - cbll.net Domain name registered and pointed to server.

March - First environmental information appears on web site (a blog post about e-waste in China).
March - Operating system of server is changed to Red Hat Linux 8.0 from Windows 98.
April - Site is used to present many school projects.
April - The current server, Andreas, was put into operation running Red Hat 9.
May - Disposable Society web site is put on line.
May - New super-fancy garish metal interface is created.
November - Ugly garish metal interface is finally replaced.

November 9 - I presented my high school "Graduation Project" on CBLL.NET and related web design projects, server operations, etc.

December - "Searching For Order...In This World of Entropy" slogan put into effect.

March - Ministry of Fire Blog is launched, with the intention of becoming a news aggregator for waste-to-energy plants and related items. It never really got off the ground, mainly due to a lack of time and energy for maintenance.
November - International Database of Waste-to-Energy Plants is launched. The database never really got off the ground, I did not have the time to take care of it though the software still exists and may resurface somewhere/sometime else.

January - The Outhouse radio is finally updated with all movies and radio shows made.
June - Some GUI updates, mainly adjusting the header/footer to make the page look prettier.
December 23 - Registration of the domain name yeroc.us, which will become the new domain for the web site.
December 23-Jan 1 - Web Site updated, content reviewed.

August 01 - Web hosting changed from in-house to Arvixe. This gives me more bandwidth, hopefully more reliability, and reduces the burden on some other parties who shared the old in-house servers. It also fits better with my current lifestyle where I tend to move between three cities in a seemingly random fashion, and being physically responsible for a server which is in only one of those places was becoming a challenge, especially when flaky wifi connectivity was my only link to it.
August 02 - Andreas (the old server, running since 2003) is retired. Andreas is still a decent machine, a new hard drive is all that he needs to perform well (the six-year-old drive was a bit of a gamble), but as for hosting my site it is no longer in service.

The "Articles" section of the site was broken down into two distinct sections: Unquantized, which carries mostly commentary, opinion, and philosophical material, and Engineering, which contains technical information and projects.
The Angstrom 5550 site was developed to replace the older media sites (none of which were ever complete or finished).
Initially, Facebook Connect was used to grant access to the Angstrom 5550 site.

Many fine-grained improvements and changes were made during this time. I also introduced a shift away from highly opinionated or highly political commentary, understanding its futility and unimportance and propensity to stimulate premature judgment.

I decided to move away from the Boastmachine blog platform, and away from a traditional "blog" style site in general. Content which is worthwhile is moved to permanent "articles" under the Unquantized
A full re-work of the site was performed, with a new database-driven content storage/management system put in place using SQLite. Previous incarnations of the content management system used MySQL, static PHP files with content, or XML files loaded on demand. The new system uses a simpler SQLite database, to minimize the number of files and such that need to be dealt with.
The Angstrom 5550 site was actually finished, and the authentication system put in place to limit access to media.
Facebook Connect was abandoned and I considered it to be too great of a security hole.

A new page style is introduced, with an image-map on the home page providing a visual directory of important contents.

A caching mechanism was built to generate static files from the dynamic content, and use Content Negotiation to serve them.
Some optimization was performed, HTML was re-ordered so that content comes before the right-side navigation block. In addition, titles were updated to order important keywords at the beginning with the category name and finally site name at the end.

CREATED/WRITTEN: 2002-12-01 00:00