A typical example of the handmade hilltribe silver jewelry this site offered for sale
As a systems engineer and system administrator in the '90's I've integrated complex mixed environments using Win PCs, Mac, Sparc and Linux workstations with Novell, WinNT, Sun, AIX and Linux file, print and application servers. I found I could manage and monitor several platforms by using PERL driven websites my interest in HTML began to grow beyond my personal website. The web could be used for serious work. I began to develop multi-platform web-based inventory-control, billing, job control and other applications for small businesses as well as IT infrastructure monitoring applications. I loved PERL. PERL was intuitive and robust. I built a full job/billing/inventory control web-based application nine years ago, I stopped in at the shop on my return to the U.S. - it is still in production today!
PERL was a cool tool. I began to experiment with simple informational and small business websites. When building sites for any reason, maintaining the site's content is almost as important and getting it presented. Separating content (data) from the code seemed the key to making robust and dynamic sites. I began to toy with Mason, I could embed script code right into HTML! How cool was that? Further research proved that PHP had the same feature and enjoyed a much wider support on available hosting sites. It turns out that embedded code is not all that great either.
To Embed or Not to Embed
At first glance, embedded PHP code looked pretty cool. As scripting need grows beyond a simple "Hello World" type display or handling few variables and the scripts become programs, embedded code becomes fragmented and a nightmare to maintain or troubleshoot. I created my first PHP based website by separating the PHP code from html content using html snippets tied together with a few PHP scripts. This worked OK. Although I have seen instances where embedded code is appropriate, for dynamic sites that actually gather and present changing data it is just inefficient, in my opinion.
As I began to sell my coding skills to the highest bidder, I realized to build truly portable code and to present true catalog functionality that the entire site should be an application based on data stored in a true database. Mambo was the BIG THING at the time Drupal was hardly discussed and Joomla was yet to branch off from Mambo. Besides, how hard could it be to build my own CMS that afforded more control over the ultimate xHTML presented?
As I began to sell my coding skills to the highest bidder, I realized to build truly portable code and to present true catalog functionality that the entire site should be an application based on data stored in a true database. Mambo was the BIG THING at the time Drupal was hardly discussed and Joomla was yet to branch off from Mambo. Besides, how hard could it be to build my own CMS that afforded more control over the ultimate xHTML presented?
