Welcome to the Catslair revival project
Good afternoon,
Catslair is a website which I build from the ground up using both Expression Web and
eventually solely with Visual Studio (2012, now 2019). The main purpose of this site was
to give me both a platform as well as a testing ground for my ASP.NET routines. The site used to
run on FreeBSD powered by Apache & Mono. But due to a rather busy schedule I ended
up deciding to get a VPS running Windows Server & IIS so that I could get my stuff
back online a.s.a.p. Which is where we are now (2020): the revival project. Powered by
IIS and administrated using Visual Studio 2019 community edition.
I've added a 'last updated' disclaimer on several pages, any page which has been updated after
the 10th of April will contain updated contents. Having that out of the way....
Catslair used to be hosted on IIS running on Windows Server 2003, then I moved to
FreeBSD 10 while using Apache 2 & Mono, one of the most impressive combinations in my opinion.
And now (2020) it's back to IIS :-)
.
From OS/2 (Warp/Merlin) and Linux (Debian / Ubuntu) to Windows (7) on my desktop,
and now from "plain" HTML using Dreamweaver 3 to TypoScript, plain HTML
with Quanta+, Java ("EE enabled") right down to the current situation
of ASP.NET using C# and powered by IIS, the setup you're seeing right now.
The why and how is explained in the appropriate sections; but bottom
line is that I still don't like working with PHP, my Java impression has gone
down hill as of late (with many thanks to Oracle) and this doesn't leave
many options if you want to build a 'dynamic' website without using a
CMS while still insisting on using a Java (-like) programming
language.
I already hear some people say that I should probably have looked into Javascript,
but nah. I want server-side dynamics, not client-side "pollution".
As such we're back to some more active development.
What is this?
Catslair.org is my playground; a website which I use to try things out,
and to simply have some fun building. It's also a website where I (try to)
share information on some of the things I use and do, which can hopefully
help or inspire some of you out there as well.
Right now it's a website with a few ASP Master pages, a re-defined general layout
using a custom build CSS stylesheet and a dynamic menu (to the right) which I
programmed using C#.
The site design has been set up using Microsoft's Expression Web 4 in
combination with Expression Design 4. The "back end logic" has been
programmed using Visual Studio 2012 Professional, you can read more about
all that on their own dedicated pages.
