Hello Fellow Developer

Hi – This page is currently under construction but will shortly tell you a little bit about the developer behind this website and some of the technologies involved.

History

This website began way back in 1999 and was originally hosted on Freeserve servers. Freeserve was very popular at this time and gave ‘free’ access to the Internet. Of course, it wasn’t free; there was a dial-up connection cost, so time connected was watched like a hawk! As well as an Internet connection, all customers of Freeserve were given a bit of space on their servers [it may have been as much as 30MB, I can’t remember] to host a web-page which is where the humble beginnings of this site began.

At the time there was no server side scripting or databases, so everything was coded in raw html [using Windows Notepad of all things] with some client-side JavaScript for generating repeating bits of html for different contexts [a template!]. This was long before the days of frameworks like Angular/React etc; but the need was clearly there – and I was already creating my own framework!

The content of the website was a little random at first. Primarily it was used to learn and play with web technologies, but I soon began writing about mountain biking; documenting all of my favourite routes across the Surrey Hills in the UK. It was around this time I began to learn to hang glide and when I eventually qualified, as well as keeping records in my BHPA Flight Logbook, I also began documenting my flights on the website in a sort of flying blog. It was nothing special, no databases, just lots of individual html pages for specific flying dates.

With the introduction of broadband, Freeserve slowly diminished into the technical archives and I decided to host my website properly. Initially this was under the domain morphic.co.uk, hosted on Easily web-servers. This was active for a couple of years until I was approached by a business wanting the domain, initially for free, but transferred to them after a small fee was agreed [June 2022, the domain is no-longer in used but is still owned].

Like everything on the Internet, things and styles changed quickly and it became increasingly difficult modifying all the many static html files then uploading to the server. At one point I had a home coded C++ application [that was my professional programming language at the time] parsing and updating the files before uploading to the web-server! It soon became evident that I needed to use some server side scripting and hence, discovered and used php. There were no libraries like CakePHP and Laravel at the time [CakePHP released in 2005 and Laravel in 2011, so I was really developing everything from the ground up. Eventually, everything was now done on the server; all the old JavaScript that was generating content from within the browser was stripped out.

It was at this time I started using a MySQL database, initially holding details of my hang gliding flying logs but soon extended to every image, video, mp3 and every article throughout the website. As I started increasing the functionality of the website [generating my Flightlog statistics], I slowly started reverting back to JavaScript and the very popular jQuery library.

Next Steps

Where I am going next with it? Well, the trend is; and to be fair, has been for a while, Single Page Applications or SPAs and I’m currently trying to find time to use Angular and re-do the entire website as a SPA; still using PHP and MySQL on the back-end to implement an API that the Angular SPA will consume.