About the Catslair website
A lot has changed since the prevous Catslair site, and other things
just never change. This website is still hosted on a private server,
but now running FreeBSD instead of Windows Server 2003R2. The picture on
the left show you the previous Magi server which has been limited to
LAN usage only. Catslair.org has been moved to the Breve server.
Magi
The Magi (shown on top) had a VIA mainboard (Cyrix processor), runs at 866Mhz
and has 1Gb internal memory which is plenty for the things I'm
doing with it. I got the mainboard from
Alternate
while the case came from
Powerline.
Both are Dutch computer shops. Though be warned; the actual purchase
happened a long time ago ;-)
Breve
The Breve, as shown on the right, is a little more powerful. It has an AMD CPU running
at 1800Mhz, 8Gb internal memory, both SCSI and SATA disks both used for different ZFS
pools and obviously in RAID. It runs FreeBSD which provides me with a lot of flexbility
and one of the key features which I'm utilizing is the ZFS filesystem.
The website
The website itself was initially designed using Microsoft's Expression Web 4, and
most logo's and pictures on the site have been processed using
Expression Design 4. You can read more about these design products on the
Expression website.
However, soon after I started working with Visual Studio 2012 I also moved the
site maintenance into a Visual Studio web service project. As such all current
design is fully done using Visual Studio. It took Microsoft a while to get things
working properly, but right now I feel that VS 2019 is a solid replacement for
Expression Web.
All the underlying logic has been programmed using C#.NET.
Changes
The biggest changes on the site in comparison to the previous ones are the new layout
(designed using CSS stylesheet(s), embedding ASP.NET for the sites behavioural design and
the tools used to create all this. My main goal is to use this site as a
testing ground for C# classes and routines which are to be used on other
website projects as well (the so called user controls).
Of course the ultimate goal is to have some fun building all this,
while hopefully providing possible website visitors some fun in
reading all this :-)
Cookies
By default the Catslair website shows all smileys as plain text. You can change
this behavior by using the checkbox in the menu to the right, but by doing so
the website will store a cookie on your computer so that it can recall your
preference.
The cookie will be kept on your computer for a maximum of 7 days
after your last visit to Catslair.org. If, however, you don't want this cookie
then you can click on the now also visible delete button which becomes available
in the menu as soon as a cookie is present. Clicking it will instruct the website
to remove the cookie immediately.
Note that removing the cookie will obviously also reset the smiley display to its
default behaviour.