About this Site
deefs.net has been my playground for trying out new web-based technologies since 2000. It is also a place where I store information for myself and for friends.
As such, it probably has broken links and pictures, though I do try and keep it clean. Let me know if you see things that are broken, and I’ll get them fixed.
Server
deefs.net was originally run from Iceberg, a server that I had in my dorm room at Dartmouth. I was able to get a fixed IP address for it (primarily for the purpose of running NAVGAP, and wanted a permanent non-Dartmouth E-Mail address, so I eventually came up with this domain and put the first version of the site online.
After graduation, it had a brief stint on an old Solaris machine named Glacier, then lived on Avalanche from November ‘02 through January ‘05. Avalanche was my first decent-quality hosted server, which served me well until the hosting company starting having 10-hour+ outages every few weekends.
It then lived on Hurricane, a server in Florida, for about a year, alternated between Thunder and Lightning, two other hosted servers, then went back to a new Avalanche, which replaced Thunder, and was there from December ‘06 through August ‘09, running Drupal.
The site was offline for a little over two months after I replaced Avalanche and didn’t want to install (or, more specifically, keep up with the security releases with) Drupal on the new server, which is the fourth generation of Iceberg. In late October ‘09, I picked a new platform and brought the site back online again.
Software
I have probably used over a dozen different technologies for posting web pages on deefs.net, from plain HTML to complete content management systems.
Drupal holds the record for longest use of a single platform, having been used from 2006 through 2009. Previous iterations have included static HTML, Server-Side Includes, Reflection 1 (my first CMS attempt), WebGUI, Reflection 2, and a simple (but powerful) Mason+mod_perl+Markdown combination.
The current iteration of the site is using Movable Type, by Six Apart. I decided after a couple of months of not having the site that I’m not looking for anything terribly complicated for Deef’s Net — just a way to post static pages within a template, and a way to write articles every now and then, preferably with some way of categorizing them and making them searchable. Movable Type seems to fit the bill nicely.
