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It has been nearly seven years since I developed any type of website so as you visit over the next few weeks it is possible you may encounter errors or see strange things going on. Have no fear; it will all come together before long. It is amazing just how far web content management has come over the past few years. The last site I built was an eCommerce site for a network marketing company. Back then everything was built from scratch using active server pages (ASP) on Microsoft boxes. Although I was a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE) and Microsoft Certified Trainer at the time most of my experience in the server room had been on either Red hat Linux or Sun Solaris boxes. It was a huge project that involved creating and managing a database of over 20,000 product and 5,000 sales associates.

I had intended to leverage my previous experience to build this site but quickly found that just about everything I knew about building websites was completely obsolete. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use some type of content management system (CMS) as the base for this site. I’m no stranger to CMS as I was hired by OnDisplay just before they were purchased by Vignette, one of the leaders in professional, large scale content management. At that time I was a Senior Network Engineer and responsible for the San Ramon, California network operations. I was also charged with the world wide deployment of Microsoft’s System Management Server to facilitate remote control, software installation and network monitoring. I was the last man standing so to speak when the office was closed to consolidate operations to the Austin, Texas facility. So although my stint with those companies primarily consisted of working with the network infrastructure I did fill in from time to time as to provide our sales team with technical support in the field. This allowed me to become vaguely familiar with Vignettes CMS.

Because of this experience I knew from the beginning that level of software would be complete overkill for this project. Additionally, I know I’m going to require some custom features that would cost a small fortune to have a vendor write but that I am more than capable of coding myself. After spending the last week evaluating various CMS’s I have settled on Drupal. Although it is missing some basic functions like the ability to set publish and retract dates for articles (which completely baffles me as to why) over all it appears to be a very strong system. It is also written in PHP which I have quite a bit of experience with so this should make adding custom features a bit easier.

You may wonder why I don’t just farm out the website construction if my skill sets are so obsolete. Quite frankly it is because I miss working with computers. I have always enjoyed coding especially to automate repetitive tasks or when interfacing with information stores. Nearly everything you will see on this site is actually stored in a database and is dynamically generated when you request the page. This is pretty much the norm for any serious website these days. At some point I’m sure we will bring someone on to take over the technical aspects of this project but I’m looking forward to getting things up and running myself. For now the only thing that I have definite plans for is to have someone create the graphics as I have virtually no experience in this area. I also have another little website that is completely unrelated to this one I’m going to be assisting my wife to get her site, CrabCab.com, up and running. She enjoys having hermit crabs as pets and wanted a place to show off her crabs.

In the mean time, you may want to browse some of the books we have made available to you in association with Amazon.com. I started purchasing books from Amazon back in the 90’s when I owned and operated an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Since then my wife and I have purchased everything from audio books, music and even supplies for our restaurant business. I have always found their service to be excellent, prices very reasonable and shipping to be quick. It only made sense to use them to provide some of the resources we want to make available to you.