| Below is a journal of how our family website came into being and how it has evolved over time. It describes the features and advances I have implemented in my continuing march towards technical excellence. (listed from latest to earliest) |
January 2001
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I made a major change regarding website design. I have enlarged the Digital Memories to allow for wider pictures (from 400 pixels to 500 pixels wide) and for much higher quality resulting in bigger files . I decided to be forward-looking by using higher quality picture files that may be too slow to download in today's current generation of home phone internet connections. It can only improve by the years. If I have time, I will re-scan all the existing pictures to this bigger and better versions. | ||||
July to December 2000
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This was a lazy period for my website. I just was working as
a web developer and my interest was focused on my job.
I mainly do the household maintenance with some minor
improvements.
I added a second page to the Visitor's Statistics for the lower count pages. The Guestbook was divided into two pages, with the lesser important entries exiled to the behind page. 
For the countries mentioned in the site (about 18 to date),
I collected both digital sound recordings of their
respective national anthems and the lyrics.
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| May to June 2000 | I revisited my Digital Memories page. Added Rosalie's recent photos from the Philippines and added more old photos into more categories. After about a dozen new pages, the web site has now crossed the 200-page threshhold. |
April 2000
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I have started on a new series of pages that features the pictures I submitted for my photography course. At this time, there are only one front page and three photo project pages. |
March 2000
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I added a new set of three pages: the scanned work references from
my past bosses. I am further mining my log files and my Visitor's
Statistics now include the preferred browsers and operating system
of my visitors.
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February 2000
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I figured out how to create bots or spiders that visit other
websites and retrieve information. I applied the concept by
gathering weather forecasts and newspaper headlines from around
the world. I set up a crontab so that these bots will wake up
a few times each hour and get executed.
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January 2000
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I wrote programs to index the pages of this site and load
them onto a MySql database. A page was then added
Search This Site to use my in-house search engine.
I am getting serious with JavaScript. I even bought a book. That train was really good huh! |
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December 1999
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In anticipation the to send Christmas cards and the
chance to brag about my website, more than 50 new
photos were scanned and over a dozen more pages were added to
Digital Memories> taking the total pages
(in Digital Memories alone)
close to a hundred. I hope to add more in the near future.
I dabbled my hand into basic graphics animation tricks and designed the banners similar to those ads that everyone see everywhere. And then, if someone wants to make a clickable ad banner link from their site to this site, I have provided HTMLs that can be cut and paste in "Link to this Site". I made use of the logs I have been keeping and wrote some programs to tally the clicks per page and present them in "Visitors' Statistics". The referer logs on how visitors find our site is also reported on "Paths to Our Door". |
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November 1999
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There are two other websites "TheHappyFamily.com"
and "Eyarbee.com" that are consuming my time.
Links were added to this site. By design and purpose,
this is the only link to pages that are outside the site.
Bits and pieces of "JavaScript" codes were implemented. The changing pictures in the home page, the butterflies following the cursor, and the ants and bugs are the more graphical ones (I have to hack other people's scripts on some). Also, the pull-down menu in the photo gallery that allows visitors to jump from any photo to any other photo is another JavaScript technique. |
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October 1999
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I hacked and put together a super-cool script to inquire
on domain names on all available domain name registries in the world.
Chelsea's top-performer science project was presented.
I have moved the website to a new hosts with more features and much bigger space (150 mb) to accomodate my growing requirements (of course for a higher price of $15/month). Those of you who have e-mailed noticed that I have now an auto-responder as part of this change. As a continuation of the logging mechanism that pervades the site, I have written new programs and a new page "Visitors' Statistics" that will read the log files generated over the months and tally them page by page and present the result dynamically in a graphical fashion. |
September 1999
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A behind-the-scene logging was implemented. Everytime a
visitor clicks on a page, the visitor's number and date/time
is recorded. And visitors can be view their log entries
by going to "The Webmaster is Watching".
Also added was the "Legal Notice" page after noticing that almost every site has one. |
| August 1999 | Five new pages were added. As the top navigation bar can no longer accommodate more buttons, the "Site Index" was created and replaced the Contact Info in the top navigation frame which in turn was subsumed into this new page. | ||||||||||
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July 1999
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I added the ability to upload photo files to the
Guestbook.
The shopping cart feature was implemented in the Photo Gallery and its button added to the top navigation bar. The "About Us" page was split into halves; the other half became a new page by itself "Family Journal". |
June 1999
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I registered our domain name www.bautistafamily.com and
secured our place in the internet community.
Found a server that will host my website for a reasonable price ($5/month), that provides me enough space (30mb) and bandwidth (300mb/month) and the ability to run my own CGIs. Purchased another book "Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days" and started to learn writing PERL programs. The first CGI application I wrote was to make the homepage dynamic; the pictures alternate among 10 different photos, and the banners among 12; I now do my own hit counter. Overhauled the Guestbook>; wrote a PERL program to
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| May 1999 |
- purchased "TypeArtist" to create the banner titles on the
pages
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April 1999
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- listed our websites to the premier search engines
Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos
- continued working on and eventually published a new section: "Digital Memories" |
March 1999
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- began working on a new section that will contain a photo
archive (later called "Digital Memories") that can not fit
into the Photo Gallery; went through our albums, selecting
the photos, arranging them into groups, and giving the whole
collection an overall structure
- sprinkled the pages with animated graphics including changing the button for Contact Information with an animated one |
February 1999
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- went into direct HTML-coding and abandoned the use
of authoring softwares entirely; I converted all the
remaining pages that were Netscape-generated into a
style more into my liking; though the pages' appearance
did not change much, the HTML codes behind them were
rationalized as my HTML skills got better
- the Contact Information was added as a separate page |
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January 1999
negative images 
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- got good reviews from friends and relatives that visited the
site (or are they just being polite?)
- Pam Colebrook, a good friend and my company's secretary in Darwin, was the first person to submit an entry to the guestbook; at this time it only results in an e-mail to me - the trick to change the icons to negative images as the mouse moves to and from them was implemented - purchased a licensed copy of "WS_FTP" (this is the software I use to transfer files from my computer at home to the website server machine) |
December 1998
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- bought another book "(Sam Teach Yourself) HTML 4";
I started coding HTML directly and went beyond the
limits of Netscape Composer (like the use of frames)
- settled for the current design and format using wood background with the navigation bar at the top, five sections and their corresponding icons: Home, About Us, Photo Gallery, Guests Book, Rodney's CV - converted my resume in MSWord format into an HTML page to fill in the CV page - labored on setting up all the photo gallery pages including titles and captions (as I already have an album that represents the best, selection of the photos was not a task) - the original guestbook was a primitive one that relies on the user to have an e-mail software set-up with the entries e-mailed to me; it turns out it does not work for some people's machines - drew up an outline of our family history for the About us page - spoke to GTE (my internet service provider) on how to set up my website; I got my userid and password to their server - downloaded the WS_FTP software (free 30-day trial) for use in copying files to and from my pc to the website server - the first issue of The Bautista Family website was published with the cumbersome URL of "http://home1.gte.net/cpq21qxr" - sent out the Christmas cards to all the friends and relatives with the invitation to visit our website - the audio greetings were added in "About us" 
- went on to polish the pages; filling in more story in the "About us" and more witty captions in the "Photo Gallery" - installed a hit counter courtesy of thecounter.com |
November 1998
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- took the leap to join the 21st century and bought our
first home computer and signed-up for internet
service; our's is a modest machine with 300mhz, 48mbRAM,
and 4G harddisk
- became aware that my internet provider provides free website in their server for their customers, with a 5mb space and 400mb bandwidth - bought an introductory book "The Non-Designer's Web Book" - bought a $100-scanner and started scanning selected photographs from our albums. - tried many design formats, backgrounds, styles while learning to create web pages using Netscape's Composer; I quickly found out however that using authoring softwares are very limiting - searched the internet for graphic materials such as icons, buttons and backgrounds |
| December 1997 |
- started working for Boston Edison and got my first
exposure to the internet (doing work-related research
of course!)
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