Five year anniversary

I published my first piece of news on by old site gimpster.com five years ago today. I guess it will only be the true old-timers (of which I can only think of Kristian and my dad) who remembers this :-)

Back then I ran gimpster.com which were supposed to be a cool place with information about the GIMPS project. It since turned out that I had lots of other stuff to write about, and I quickly lost interest in the GIMPS forecast service I had planned.

Instead I keps publishing news about what happened and what interested me in my daily life. I also wrote a little tutorial on PHP one day, a script to get current weather information, and placed other more or less interesting (Danish) things online.

That seemed to work quite nicely — people came to visit and were quite happy I think. Or at least my guestbook told me so.

Of course people also sent me suggestions and told me about problems on my site. Now, being the idealist I am and generally interested in new technologies, I switched my site to a WikiWikiWeb running on [PhpWiki][]. That was really nice, for now I could create new pages very easily, and people could fix my spelling errors when they found them. The PhpWiki project is a very active one, and Reini Urban (the main coder) is very talented. Their parser is without doubt the most advanced parser I’ve seen.

So with such killer-software, why would I then switch to [WordPress][]? Because my PhpWiki installation stopped working without warning sometime between Christmas and New Years Eve 2004. The reason was that my — what would be a nice way of putting it? — progressive webhosting company NETsite decided to upgrade to [PHP][] 5. Now don’t get me wrong, I love PHP 5, it’s a much needed improvement over the mess that is PHP 4. I would just have preferred if NETsite would have given its customers a little warning first instead of just upgrading.

When I call PHP 4 a mess, I’m talking about the lack of a clear object-oriented model using reference assignment as the default. Value assignment (a shallow copy is made, I believe) just doesn’t work — and to enable reference assignment you would have to springle your code with lots of & all over the place, and just hope that you haven’t forgotten one.

With PHP 5 my installation of PhpWiki broke. I believe new versions of PhpWiki will run on PHP 5, but since I had modified my (slightly old…) version a bit here and a bit there I couldn’t just upgrade. A couple of weeks went by until I one day in February decided to try WordPress. Despite some initial complains about parse errors with Markdown and problems with special characters, I stuck with WordPress because of it’s blogging facilities. For even though I had a WikiWikiWeb running on my site, I still mostly used my site for publishing news about my life. So a proper blog seems to be what I need, and especially now that I’m in Switzerland so that I can tell people back home how it is here.

Now when I’ve converted the wiki content I will have a complete coverage of the last five years of my life. It’s not that everything in my life is reflected here online, but a significant part is, I guess. Oh, the nostalgia!

Well — see you guys in five years time!

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