alfter.us - Home

Time for a slight reworking of my website...there's some old, out-of-date stuff that needed to be updated or removed, and I thought I'd experiment with some different methods for keeping my site backed up and up-to-date. Since I'm stuck deploying internal websites at work to IIS and SQL Server, I figured I'd see if Apache, Mono, and MySQL could also be used to deploy ASP.NET webapps. Since you're reading a webpage named /Default.aspx that's served up by a Linux VPS running Apache, Mono, and MySQL, it's pretty clear that the combo does work. :-) Visual Studio .NET 2008 is a bit more heavyweight a website-creation tool than Notepad, but it offers a few useful bells and whistles. More importantly, I have the whole thing stored in Subversion now, so I can undo/redo changes and don't have to keep pulling backups from the webserver every night. After using C# for the past year, I've come to like it a bit more than PHP...either of them will get the job done, but C# offers more C-like syntax, stronger data typing, and more programmer-friendly features

The photo viewer's been rebuilt from scratch...it looks better, it works better (especially on the iPhone), and it'll chew through less bandwidth. Client-side scripting FTW!

I've been meaning to put in a blog, a homebrew-competition management program, and some other new features. I think the new setup will facilitate that...we'll see.