Version 1 - 1995
As most people who have been online for some time, my homepage has
changed over time. When I first came online in 1995, I created a
homepage over at Stack.
I had no idea how HTML works, and browsers in those days had quite
flakey rendering engines. I was expermenting mostly with javascript and
buttons and things. The site did not have a lot of actual content, but
it did contain lots of links to useful sites.
I stopped maintaining it after my 21st birthday in 1997. As you can see
it froze in time until I decided to change it later on, mostly because
the site was a mess and in no shape at all (not even compliant to any
known standard).
Version 2 - 1998
After I started the IPng project at Intouch NV in 1998, I took a new
design approach trying to keep a sober and businesslike approach. The
IPng.nl website as well as my personal website both looked the same.
They were both HTML4 compliant.
On these pages, I maintained the frontend to the IPng IPv6 tunnelbroker
[later superceded by the SixXS broker]. It turned out that one can fit a
whole lot more information on a webpage than I could using the main
windowpane to your right, but the multilevel menu did appeal to me.
I ventured on some software projects which ended up in the Sourceforge
repository. In the end, I was running several (at least four) websites
with the same layout, but not enough content to really stick out. I
decided to combine all the sites in a new website.
Version 3 - 2005
The website was created using a custom rendering engine in PHP which I
wrote for my employer BIT bv. It reads a series of directories and searches
recursively downwards for layout information. It's entirely XHTML and
CSS compliant and should look just fine in any browser. The website
www.bit.nl uses this CMS engine (from
Q1-2006 until at least Q4-2009). After neglecting my website for a while
I noticed by chance that a PHP upgrade had broken it. Unfortunately, the
PHP upgrade was a few weeks (months?) earlier, so the site had been down
for a substantial amount of time. Would a hosting provider be a good idea?
Well, I do work at Google after all, and perhaps now is a good time to
eat our own dogfood..
Version 4 - 2009
Time to experiment with the cloud - this page was hosted on Google's
hosted apps platform (I started working at Google in 2006, so I figured
it may be time for me to dogfood sites :). However, after I moved it
over I noticed the enormous amount of HTML boilerplate and the speed of
hosted sites was not very impressive, at least not from my home in
Switzerland. Around Q4 2009 my buddy Paul and I decided to do some Real
Engineering[tm], and we started a project called
paphosting, which aims to be a
somewhat high availability platform (multiple webservers, loadbalancers,
and so on). Of course, I felt compelled to eat my own dogfood, so I went
back to basics, and moved my homepage to this new redundant,
loadbalanced, highly available webserver cluster :-)
