Welcome to the Catslair revival project
Catslair is a website which I build from the ground up using both Expression Web and
eventually solely with Visual Studio (first 2012 pro, now 2019 community). The main
purpose of this site is to give me both a platform as well as a testing ground for
my ASP.NET routines and experimentation. I've become quite fond of ASP.NET and well,
that's what I'm using.
My website has been moved back and forth quite a few times; it's been hosted on IIS,
powered by a Windows server as well as on the Apache webserver, powered by the Mono
project (to provide the ASP support). As bizarre as this may sound but in my opinion
FreeBSD + Apache together with Mono and backed by the PostgreSQL server do a better
job of hosting websites than Microsoft server + IIS ever will. Why? To be explained
&Elsewhere&.
From OS/2 (Warp/Merlin) and Linux (Debian / Ubuntu) to Windows (10) 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 Apache/Mono; 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".
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, you can read more about all that on their
own dedicated pages.
