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6 captures 14 Oct 03 - 18 Jul 06 |

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The History of this site Where it all began

It all started out when I had to do a report on the Viperfish. At the bottom of one of the sites I used was a message that said, "This webpage is hosted by expage.com for your free webpage click here." I did and I made a Viperfish page too that looks like the one I have at this website now except their were no pictures, the mini quiz was not there and the two games from cartoon network were not there. Basically just the text. You know why? It's because that’s all you could put on that server at the time. Well I wanted to put more then just text on my webpage. I at least wanted to have pictures. So I tried to e-mail myself a jpg file. I received it and made a spot on my lifeless webpage for it. It only showed up when I was logged in to my e-mail. So some time later I did some searching for some better web hosting services. My favorite "the one with the most freedom" was 100megsfree.com, but you had to have the files all ready to go unlike expage where they had some kind of a Perl script that did all of the html coding for you. Well at the time I didn't have Claris Home Page so I studied html for a while and I made my Viperfish page all over again. I haven’t touched that page since then. I think It turned out pretty good for doing all of the html on my own and it being my first page. However I still wanted to do more. 100megsfree.com has a list of file extensions you couldn't upload to their server, including anything that delt with music. Exe and zip files are also banned. So one day I came up with the crazy idea of hosting a website on my own computer. I thought hey it just might by possible. Shortly I found out it was. I started out with a program called Personal Web Server PWS and my little 56k modem.

Now I could do anything I wanted and I wanted to put a guestbook on my Viperfish page. Yes I know there are sites out there that will offer guestbooks for free, but I'm independent and I don't like to rely on other people’s servers so instead of using their services, I typed in how to set up a guestbook in my favorite search engine and the results I got back all delt with Perl, cgi, cgi-bin and stuff like that. At the time I didn’t know to much about that stuff, and I simply downloaded the files and stuck them out on the web to see if it worked. It looked like a whole bunch of garbage, nothing like the sample at all. So I later opened the readme file and, like, the very first line in it said this guestbook required a program called Perl and since it didn’t work I thought I guess I don’t have Perl with this web server software that came with our computer. Personal Web Server is the name of the software. So I went to the Perl web site and downloaded active Perl. Well I unzipped it and their was no instructions of what to do with it so I put it on the root of my web server and tried the guestbook again. it still didn't work so I gave up with Perl for awhile and worked with some other things such as setting up a ftp server so when I’m at school, I could work on my web site. About 6 months later I discovered that PWS "personal web server" didn't support Perl or cgi-bin. It was the most basic

program out there. So I did some searching and found Omni HTTPD web server. This program is way more advanced. With this program all I had to do to get my guest book working was in the confg part of the program tell it where perl.exe is located and I had to do some editing to the script "tell it where certain things where located and stuff like that.” It wasn't too hard at all now that I know so much more. I was told to put the script in my cgi-bin which I had and then like magic it worked. I was so happy it was my first Perl script I had ever set up. Then I noticed it had a hell of a lot of advertisement on it that I wanted to get rid of, plus I wanted to change the background. I have to tell you that they really had the advertisement in the script good. Now I worked with a whole bunch of other scripts and I found out I did the hardest one first. Well my server stayed like this for awhile and I was Very happy with my work.

I think it was right about here that I finally got DSL that I bribed my dad so hard to get. Then I started to get interested in how people have the little password box pop up when you click on certain members only links such as the one when you try to access my music dir. The reason I blocked it off to the public is it took all of my bandwidth away. So I did some research on this and found out it worked width two files called " .htaccess " and " .htpasswd ". It was a nightmare trying to set this up for the following reasons... first of all windows would not let me put a dot in front of "htaccess" and "htpasswd". Will thank god I was working on this other project at the same time where I had to change the extension on about 100 files from .wma to .asf. I didn’t want to do each individual file so I downloaded magic file renamer and that could do it all at once. Will it took me about a week to think of trying this program and lone be hold this program can put dots in front of the htaccess and htpasswd files I carefully follow the instructions on the web site I was using for reference and When I tried it out, it didn't work. That night I triple checked everything. No luck. The next day I told my computer club teacher what I was working on and he told me that you have to tell the server software to look for these files so I looked in the confg page of my software and there was no way of activating these files. So I stopped with this way of password protecting and tried some javascript password protecting stuff, but the #1 problem with this is anyone can simply view the page source and find the passwords. I took a break from all of this and returned about 2 months latter. I found out that most web servers used Apache to run. This software could support the .htaccess files. I’m not kidding, but it took me about a week to figure out where to download a working copy of Apache for windows. I finally found it, downloaded it, set it up and it all works fine. This is how I got to where I am right now. I really enjoy working on this type of stuff. Yes it's true that at times it gets very frustrating, But I could always use the challenge.

If you have any questions that you'd
like to ask me, you can e-mail me at
webmaster@luke.kicks-ass.net.