Finally, I Sorted Out My Website
Sunday, 5th February 2012, 23:11

I think the first time I made myself a personal website, I used FrontPage from Microsoft. That was a very, very long time ago, in fact we are talking 1997 here.

FrontPage to GoLive

Yes folks, one of my early escapades into Internet website creation came courtesy of a Microsoft product, and it wasn't the last. Pretty soon I outgrew that pile of poo, partly due to the inherent security risks in using it, but mainly due to the awful HTML it produced.

Kids today will thankfully grow up in a standards compliant web world, unless HTML5 splits it apart again, but I digress...

They won't know what it was like to have competing browsers inventing whole new ways to do things, completely incompatible with each other... oh wait didn't that happen a bit with CSS3? Well maybe, but nothing in comparison to Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Navigator, the latter of which we owe the existence of Firefox to.

Post FrontPage, I moved onto Adobe GoLive, which had the sort of interface that a Photoshop addict could just about live with. And with that, I created a version of Robertsworld which would last (albeit mostly untouched) for nearly ten years.

In the meantime, I moved onto making websites with a text editor, and nothing has changed. Which leads me onto something Microsoft did right.

Microsoft Did Something Right???

I think, possibly for a short period of time, Microsoft actually understood the Internet and produced a decent product for it, before reverting to type. This was when they first released the wonders of the Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages onto the world, aka IIS and ASP.

It was in an era when the idea of mixing programming code and HTML on the server was relatively new, and they did it in a way which was at the time pretty fast and useful.

Okay, so they soon started to screw everything up with the abomination that is .NET, but for a few years ASP was a pretty good thing to use.

I'm not saying it still isn't, or that suddenly Classic ASP (as it is now called) is awful, no that crown clearly goes to PHP, a disjointed mess of a language which learnt nothing from Microsoft's mistakes with the likes of VisualBasic.

The problem with Classic ASP and PHP, is time has moved on. Most modern websites are no longer enhanced pages, they are web applications, and neither of the aforementioned technologies are remotely suited to webapps. For that you need to write an actual program, and not a collection of scripts.

So Why the Sudden New Site?

I should have done this years ago, but heck the old one worked and whilst in the beginning of my adventures with ASP/Javascript, I was busy making websites other than my own. By the time I got the time to remake this one, the excitement about ASP had gone, it would be a chore. Then, late last year I was at a dinner party with some good friends when one said, "Have you got into Node yet?"

What is this Node of which he spoke, I wondered? He knew my love for Javascript, and Node was an alternative to Classic ASP which I could use it with. But that alone wasn't enough to interest me, because I was busy doing other things.

Well a few months later I looked it up, watched a presentation by the creator of Node.js, Ryan Dahl, and I was hooked. Async and Javascript? Event driven programming? It all sent bells and whistles going off in my head, this sounded fantastic, this sounded like the future.

But I had to make a brand new Content Management System for rapid website creation, and perhaps now wasn't the time to commit to something I'd never used. So what I did was bash out a basic object based HTML framework and an OOP website approach that would work in Classic ASP but hopefully be ideal for Node.js. And then I went on holiday for a week.

When I came back, I had some work on the horizon, to make a site with the new CMS, which gave me about a week to install Node.js, port this CMS system to it and rewrite anything where appropriate. I think I did it with hours to spare, but it worked, I'd proved to myself that I could build an entire website using Node.js, and learnt a load of pitfalls of async coding and Node along the way.

Get To The Point

Okay, okay! Sheesh.

One of the first things I knocked up with this CMS was Robertsworld, but it was a proof of concept, nothing that could go live, and since I was busy making other sites with the CMS, suddenly history was repeating itself and by the time I got the time to do it I'd be bored and not interested in updating it properly.

But I've realised, I need somewhere to post about coding related things I feel should be shared with the world at large, and this is the best place for me to do it.

So I've spent a few hours tidying up the code, finishing off the bits I meant to do, and here we are. Finally, Robertsworld gets an update, some ten years later than it should have, but at least now it's up to date.

And yes, it runs entirely on Node. js. :)