Website 20 Year Anniversay

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a memory.
Patsy and I have been real busy the last year. We were fixing an old house, then had to move in before we were done. It’s been a lot of work. This wasn’t just cosmetic like clean and paint, it was structural and a lot of remodeling. We’re not finished yet but I really need to post a memory this month.

On February 17 1999, 20 years ago today, Jeff and I launched our first website. It was a website for our church. He was only 10 at the time and was already learning html. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years. I wish I had a copy of our original site so I could post a screen shot of what he made, but I learned a lesson a long time ago about what happens if your hard drive dies without a backup. There are some saved versions of the website on the Wayback Machine, but not all of the site works there. We were both learning html and Jeff later started learning php. I stuck with html and later css but he moved on to a lot of languages. One of my biggest regrets is I didn’t start learning php when he did so I could work with him on php projects.

We were new to website design and were figuring it out as we went. He ran across a site called Bravenet and used some of their free services for a while. Later we moved up to perl cgi scripts. After a while we switched over to php. We used some php scripts we found and Jeff was writing some php scripts for the site. He even put in the Meta Data <meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Tetraboy’s PHP Scripts”>.

Later Jeff moved on to doing his own sites and working a job. I ended up maintaining the site by myself. Jeff learned about WordPress and did a little research and decided to get me to switch the site over to WordPress. I kept the site up through the years until May of 2015 a couple months before his death. Due to changes at the church I took it off-line. If circumstances change I may revive the site for the church.

When I ran into an issue I would call Jeff and he would check out the site and help me fix the php code to get the site back up. I still have websites I maintain and I miss having Jeff to call when I have a problem I can’t figure out. He could give me an answer in minutes and it takes me hours to figure it out. I miss my son so much!!

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