Objectives
Designer rhetoric aside, the one thing you will not find in this site is a tag-line which merrily states
"designed for
internet explorer" or
"designed for
opera" you know why? Because I take
pride in my work. I take
pride in the fact that these very pages, even with all their
sophistication, are totally W3C standards compliant. This means that any browser
able to render a standardised, widely accepted markup language correctly will happily display these pages as they
were designed to be rendered or be able to easily extract the available elements.
I guess realistically the end goal for myself with this website is to build something I can be proud of but at the
same time not be afraid to innovate with. I'd like the site to do what it's name implies evolve its code over time
- becoming better through each evolution of simplification, increased knowledge and improved programming, with all
these things being fed by my desire to improve beyond their current state.
Now my little speech is over (and my thanks to you for actually reading it) and I'm nearing the end of the regular
content, just below this point is my site development timeline extending backwards almost 3 years, so I will leave
you to browse the timeline if that sort of thing interests you.
It covers everything from the year dot - my very first webspace account I registered, through to this - a
professionally hosted and professionally designed (or I would like to think ao) website with its own domain name,
which has the potential to rank well in my chosen areas with any of the major search engines. I have high hopes for
this site.
Timeline
1999, August
Opened up a webhosting account at Netscape's portal site, back in the days before portal
site meant some big, horrible, faceless website. This just got used for creating a very simple homepage and
the occasional groups of pages that related to whatever PBeM game I was playing/GM'ing at the time.
2000 : May
First sign of problems with my netscape webspace - it kept claiming that the account was over
quota when in fact it was not. Signed up for webspace at GeoCities under an old Yahoo! account out of desparation,
in the process all my pages began to be edited by hand rather than by using the useless visual editor which shipped
with Netscape Communicator 4.6X - this was the beginning of me picking up web design again.
2000 : July
Final set of problems with my netscape webspace - it was still claiming that the account was over
quota, I could not ever delete and re-upload! Despite mailing them for support I recieved no help of any kind. The
majority of my pages were stored locally, so I simply copied the new set to the geocities account.
2000 : September
Signed up for webspace at GeoCities with my new yahoo account, suffered many problems with
activating it so I left it - if you are wondering why I needed two sets of webspace, I didn't I just needed one...
But this was before you could ftp into GeoCities webspace and so you needed to login with you account, and my regular
account was not the one that created the webspace I used, so each time I needed to swap users - a total pain if ever
there was one. I accepted the fact that I would be host-less for a while - since the web was young back then you
could still get around without needing a website to remind people who you are.
2001 : January
After getting tired of my Netscape homepage not working for several months I created some yahoo!
geocities webspace. Due to all the problems I had with netscape most of the pages were out-of-date, and most
importantly I knew that I could create a better website with the techniques I had learnt. After much struggling to
activate this webspace I finally got it working and was prompted to create a placeholding page - since this
was built by a "
wizard",
it did look nice but was the most badly constructed page I had seen - an hour later and the page was re-coded, the
images rebuilt, and a new chapter in my website history was complete.
2001 : July
What was an old copy of my GeoCities site was merged into Freedom-2-Surf's free site. The move was literally
a copy operation, a few new pages were created but that was all - I had very little free time and F2S offered a superior
service to that which I was recieving from Yahoo! at the time.
2001 : August
This marked a period of heavy rebuilding, taking this website from what was essentially a carbon
copy of the reworked template it started from to something that actually looked
good, images were reworked, the
background was upgraded and most importantly the frameset you see now was developed.
2001 : December
One of my darkest hours whilst developing this website. The first day of my first actual break
for work in a while and I have one item waiting in my inbox - a note from the webhost (and my ISP) F2S stating that on
or before 28th February 2002 they will cease all support for their experimental webhosting unless you buy a global
hosting arrangement from them.
A few days later bought on the dawn of a new age for this site. Out for the entire F2S hosting saga I finally got
so fed up with it all I bought so hosting and a few domain names (evolvedcode.net, evolvedcode.com and
evolvedcode.co.uk if you really want to know), also this host supports ASP 3.0 so I should be able to demo a few
more features than was possible before. This will initially be creating a framework around which content pages can
be standardised very easily, allowing maintenance of pages to be much simplified.
2002 : January
A heavily re-engineered version of the website goes live.
2002 : April
Google drops the site from its main index, referrals from google steadily drop off and page
impressions drop to almost half of what was being achieved in January during the height of my quest for karma at
slashdot. Up until this point referral were pretty even but now my main referrer becomes MSN as a result of a
badly copy-edited directory entry (to make matters worse it points to the www. version of the site).
2002 : May
Google starts to re-index the site again and it re-appears in the index, however this time around
I'm not top for my particular keyword.
2002 : June
New content section goes live featuring user-defined filtering, this coupled with changes to
general directory structures for the content and articles meant that lots of extra effort was being put in for
not a lot of extra traffic. Also I attempted to get the looksmart/zeal/msn directory entry updated so I'm curious
to see how this affects traffic.
2002 : September
More new content gets put into the system and a few good links into the site boost it to PR3
in Google although a new site means that I'm not 1
st on the results page for the term "tony welsh"
anymore. Oh well it was nice while it lasted!
2002 : December
Site is still running a clean PR3 but getting a few unprompted links in from other sites which
justifies the time and effort I try to put into the content that goes onto the site and over time these will all add up
increasing the rank of the site. Anyway site hasn't dropped any more places on the search engines - if anything traffic
has been steadily increasing, last month was one of the busiest months so far with 10,000 requests of which approximately
4,500 were for pages and of these 3,200 were from non-robots.
This means that the ratio of human traffic to robot traffic has increased - previously robots accounted for 35% of all the
hits the site got - they not account for 25% which is quite a nice statistic. Much of December also saw a brand new set of
request management code being worked on to replace the old 'bot rules system.
2003, January
New request management code goes out onto the site.
2003, May
Site temporarily boosted to PR6 then returned to PR3, traffic tops hits 20,000 hits for the first time - very roughly
speaking this works out to about 7,500 actual browser sessions through-out the month.
2003, June
Upgraded the hosting package the site uses to a different system, so hopefully it should be more stable and run a little
bit faster.
2003, July
Site achieves an even PR5 on the front page and a few of the internal content pages. Judging by log sizes there is a
reasonably amount of traffic going through the site at the moment.