Websites, websites, websites…

The following weblog was originally posted on DieselDragon’s Website, and has been restored from backup. My apologies for any bad formatting, code errors or broken links that may exist as a result of conversion to this weblog. 🙂

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For the first time in a good three months, I thought it might be high time to scribe another weblog post. Well actually, I did write a huge article about the price of water bills and the credit crunch in general back at the end of January…But in the end I didn’t bother uploading it. There’s enough crap on the web already, and another 14Kb of the stuff from me won’t be of benefit to anyone.

Anyhow…Once again, I’m struggling to think of what exactly to do with the DieselDragon website, and in which direction I really ought to be aiming it. As anyone who comes here on a regular basis (Not that there’s much point in that) already knows, the only time this site ever gets updated is on those very rare days when I can actually be arsed to sit down for twenty minutes and type out a new weblog post.
Article wise, I havn’t added owt here in ages, and – Though there is another hacking related article that I can now upload following it’s publication in 2600 Magazine a couple of months back – I havn’t got anything else coming, bar another 2600 submission that has to be accepted or rejected for publishing before I can post it here. 😐

When I first started this site, it was intended to be my own personal homepage and public information resource. Not only a place for me to host my online profile and other things like my CV and articles that I have written, but also a place where I could assemble and manage the stuff usually found on social profiling sites; Photo albums, friend lists, video and music collections, that sort of thing.
Yet – Well over a year since I crafted the current version of this site – I still havn’t been able to come up with anything better than an infrequently written weblog, a random and fragmented collection of pages on the most diverse range of subjects, and probabally the crappest U.I. seen on the Internet since Compuserve days! 😦

So what has made me start thinking about the DieselDragon site in such a pessimistic manner? Well…Ever since day one, I’d wanted this site to be a homepage and info resource as described above. I also wanted it to be a fully-featured site; A system which would exploit the full potential of serverside ASP applications and databases to allow me to create and host a website that – Though very quick and easy for me to update – Would become an easy to use and regularly updated interface for anyone who wanted to connect with me in any way.
As a temporary fix to prevent the much despised “Under Construction” page, I first bashed out a very simplistic interface that did nothing more than load a plain text file and dump it’s contents to the outgoing data…A system that – Though very simplistic and rudimentary – Would have been OK as a temporary solution. But as many may already have guessed by my scribings above, the site has been running on that same “temporary” interface ever since it opened, and – Knowing that I have all the drive of a dead Goldfish nowadays – It’ll probabally still be in use right up until I either get a decent system of some kind running (Very unlikely) or decide to bury this project and just keep the domain name for e-mail related purposes. 😦

I can’t really place why it is, but I simply find that I can never get the sufficient motivation or time to do anything proper with this site nowadays. Indeed, earlier this morning I was initially thinking about how such a fully-featured interface could be written and how it could work…But after thirty minutes, two cigarettes and a mug of coffee had passed, I simply found once again that I couldn’t even get any ideas about how the site should work, how it should look, and how on earth it should function at the technical level. :’-(
As it is, I’ve found that the servers at Brinkster – The webhost that I use – Have become increasingly unreliable and failure-prone over recent times, and even simple (Fully tested and known working) ASP applications often glitch them to high buggery. Although a database-driven site would be a nice idea, the hosting servers probabally wouldn’t support such a thing – At least not in their current state. A text file based approach would probabally be more reliable and could be ported over to future PHP/CGI versions of the site if necessary…But then again, trying to use text files as databases is a very CPU intensive process, and I have to consider that I’m sharing this server with 200+ other users! :-S

It’s a real pity that the number of people maintaining personal homepages and websites has fallen significantly since the advent of sites like Facebook, as it now leaves me with very few places that I can look to for ideas. As it is, it feels like what I have here is simply a messy pile of pages and other assorted gumpf that just wastes space on the Internet, and doesn’t do bugger all for anyone – Save give me a major headache whenever I sit down and try to figure out what exactly I ought to use the site for, and what should be on it.

I don’t suppose anyone really bothers reading this weblog nowadays…But if anyone reads this and has any good ideas for what I could do with this site, please feel free to wang ’em in as comments on this weblog, and – Assuming I can ever find the drive and the energy within me to sit in front of Notepad for a few hours – I’ll see if I can bring ’em to fruition. 🙂

Farewell for now, and cheers in advance for any suggestions! >:-)