The personal web site of Mark Fyviefyvie.net started life in October 2001. It had rather humble beginnings, and I originally registered the domain just to use it for email addresses for my family and I. After a few months I put up a rather horrible looking site with Netobjects Fusion. I figured that this was the future of web publishing. I manually added my rather small collection of digital photos, as digital cameras weren't especially popular back then. I soon realised that authoring web sites in this way was a complete waste of time, and resolved to completely remove the old site, as it was an embarrassment.
Until March 2002 the domain had been hosted by a friend of mine on his Cobalt RAQ server. The company I had previously been working for went bankrupt, and I was basically able to pick up my own RAQ server fairly cheaply. It was a novel idea, and I had no experience at all with running my own web server. I moved fyvie.net across to my new server, placed the server in a data center and have been hosting it there ever since.
By June 2003 my collection of digital photos had grown and I needed to find a solution to put them online. I found JAlbum and started writing my own custom skin for it. This lead me to buy books on HTML and CSS, and before long I found myself deleting the horrible old Netobjects Fusion site and creating a completely new-look site from scratch with a text editor. The process was a little frustrating but fun, and I learned some useful skills outside of my normal skill set.
Apart from an ever growing collection of digital photos, content at fyvie.net remained rather light, or almost nonexistent. In November of 2003 the rather extensive ExhibitPlus documentation was added to the site, but this remained invisible to users on the main part of the site. Despite a lack of content traffic steadily rose due to the increasing popularity of both the photo collection and ExhibitPlus for JAlbum.
Another two years passed and traffic had risen to over 500 unique visitors per day. In the meantime I'd been busy with various other projects, and fyvie.net had always been neglected (apart from updates to the photos). In October 2005 I finally took the decision to invest considerable time in putting up more content. The idea behind the content expansion was to make public all the various bits and pieces that I'd been working on - maybe others would find them interesting or useful. After all, what's the point of keeping all this stuff locked away on your hard drive? Prior to October 2005 Google ranked fyvie.net with PageRank 6, and the ExhibitPlus documentation as a staggering PageRank 7! In early 2006 the entire site reached PageRank 7.
fyvie.net will remain the central place for my personal activities. It will remain as a set of static pages for the time being. Perhaps at some point in future it might be converted into a CMS-based site with software like Joomla! Photos and content will be continually updated from time-to-time. It may also get a redesign of the colour scheme and layout.
Site type: Static, uses hand-authored XHTML/CSS pages
Design: Self-designed. Information on graphics
Software used: Textpad (text editor), htmlcutter
Hardware used: Hosted on an Asus RS120-E3, housed in a professional data centre
Traffic figures as of October 2005 (average daily figures):
500 visits, 2500 pages, 20,000 hits
Traffic figures as of June 2006 (average daily figures):
1000 visits, 3500 pages, 30,000 hits
Since you are viewing this page on fyvie.net, a link isn't really needed
