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The Era of Geocities (November 1999)The web-designing days started long back when I was in 12th standard and got a brand new computer (my first). Those were the times of Angelfire, Geocities and Tripod. When people believed that designing (or rather using a pre-built template) on these services was a big achievement. It used to be a fad where-in everyone wanted to own a website on Geocities. So even I had decided to jump onto the bandwagon and started off with that. |
Hard-Coded HTML (March 2000)After sometime, I thought that it was too lame and felt the need for changing the layout and adding newer things. That was when I started learning HTML. I thought it was easy. And it was. But the flipside was that it was neither powerful nor dynamic. |
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The Days of FrontPage (May 2000)The next step was using FrontPage. The day I became a champion with FrontPage I thought I had got everything. But I was wrong. Not only did FrontPage prove to be another Microsoft product for newbies but also it did not support the newer more browser friendly technologies. FrontPage reached a dead-end with the advent of Mozilla and Opera. |
Moving on to dynamism (August 2000)As i waded through hardcoding and FrontPage, the new concept of Javascripting began to enthrall me as I started learning the traits of how to make pages speak themselves by using various javascript functions to throw up alerts and display movement. But this is something that couldnt hold my attention for too long. Hence I acquired the basic skills required and moved on to better things in webdesigning. |
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The hand that rocks! (June 2001) ASP proved to be my forte as I learnt about truly dynamic pages and the concept of database interaction. That was when I started hunting for free web hosts supporting ASP/MS-Access and landed upon the most popular of the lot - Brinkster. This is when I started exploiting the power of web-designing to its fullest. I started churning out small scriptlets that let me do things like adding a record and making a guestbook etc. It was time to move on to bigger things and decided to dabble with a big script. |
The Blog Slog (June 2003) At around the same time, the concept of blogging started gaining momentum, as did my drive for creating bigger scripts with ASP. I started off by using rediffblogs for a very brief period of time and then a wild idea crossed my mind. Why use these services when you can create one of your own. So was born the first version of BlogMe (which has now moved to version 3.0). I sold my first script on August 01, 2003. At around the same time TagBoards started picking up with people for instantaneous communication. Hence came out a simple but an effective script in the form of TagMe (which then became Tagger Pro). It can all be found at Gamma Scripts |
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The days at Motif (January 2004)Motif Magazine came as a collaboration between me and Nix. It took me a long time to code the whole magazine to appear in a dynamic way whilst pulling it out from the database. And while I was at it, Nikhil was toying with the idea of a forum that would really simple and wouldnt hog much bandwidth (we had bandwidth limitations - still have them). So work started on the forum as well with Nikhil bringing in the concept while I coded furiously day in and day out. After a few weeks toil came out Motif Magazine in all its glory! And for me it was one more script on the shelf of Gamma Scripts. |
Open Source (I cried hoarse!) (June 2004) After a year and half at ASP, I realised that there are better things which come for free and ASP no longer had the charm. Classic ASP was fighting a losing battle against the likes of PHP, JSP and CFM. I decided to go ahead and find out how PHP is. Afterall, once the logic of database interaction and manipulation is built, all you have to do is learn the syntax. And learn I did. PHP proved to be really good and I started writing cleaner and more powerful pieces of code. I used to sell the ASP Scripts on Gamma Scripts and I thought, hey, why not have something free also. And logic said that no one is going to pay for a PHP script anyways. Afterall whats OpenSource for? So I came out with BlogMe PHP after about a weeks effort in learning and implementing PHP. (The PHP installation on my windows workstation was a pain in the ass until I found out about SWAMP, development of which sadly has been discontinued). |
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Dream on! (January 2004) The need of the hour as I found out was pages for which new designs can be applied with the click of a mouse. I had avoided Macromedia Dreamweaver© since its version 3.0, but with the release of Dreamweaver MX, I couldnt avoid it anymore. Extremely powerful and beautiful, it would prove to be a webdesigner's best friend and so it did. As I churned out templates after templates in Dreamweaver, the code was getting heavier and complex to understand. |
Standardize! (September 2005)At around the sametime, angelic people from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), started standardizing the fleeting technologies. Hence evolved CSS, XML and XHTML. This latest version of my website is completely based on CSS. The template is straight out of Macromedia Dreamweaver, but it took me about 5 days to customize the template and to suit for my needs. At the same time I learnt a lot about CSS, much more than the basic understanding I had. And about a month back I had started toying with the idea of an RSS Feed for my blog, which I finally managed to create after lots of trial and error and flicking code snippets from various resources. |
I believe there is a long way to go before I rest and as we all know the net thrives on the principle of "There today, Gone tomorrow!"