Site FAQ

I did, from scratch. Pure HTML and CSS with a few lines of JavaScript on the client side, and PHP with MySQL on the server side, and that's it. I use no frameworks, no libraries, no extenal scripts, no external CSS, no font files, no cookies. Everything is extremely simple. None of the garbage that bloats almost every site on he web these days—junk that is often pressed into service as a poor sbstitute for competent programming these days.

This site is simple, but how fancy does a web site have to be? The page you are readng is literally a hundred times smaller than the average web page on the Internet these days—and most of what is downloaded is images. My site doesn't even require JavaScript.

Most web sites are around 4 MB in size and may load two hundred files per page. Mine is about 0.2 MB in size and typically loads four or five files. Load time for my site is about 300 ms, compared to around 19,000 for more typical sites.

I do. Azure was costng too much money, so I returned to hosting my own site. It runs as a Linux virtual machine on a tiny computer about the size of a paperback book, sitting on a cardboard box. A standard LAMP configration.

I use a text editor (an old copy of UltraEdit) to write the code, and SecureCRT to SSH into the server. I use SecureFX for movinng data files. That's it.

Since 1997, my site has received 24,124,632 visitors.