this site

This site

I have had a website since the mid 1990s. I registered the edholden.com domain name around the year 2000 and built a site of basic static HTML. It had little purpose. My second site used Dreamweaver templates, which helped a lot with page style management and looked a bit better.

A couple years ago I updated the site with PHP to manage the template, and while I was at it I did some neat tricks like rotating colors. I found that this configuration of the site was very flexible, and it is still the version in use today. It became nice looking when I started making heavy use of CSS and created a "lighthouse" theme for the site.

This is the third modification of my PHP-based site. For the second modification I decided to showcase my photography, as I've taken a lot of great digital photos, so I built the layout around a rotating header image selected at random. This third modification devotes more space to this header image and includes some code enhancements. There are now 50 header images, with new ones added regularly. The heading color CSS style is built into the page rather than the separate stylesheet, so it is linked to the randomly-selected header image and should vaguely match its dominant color on any page.

In 2006 I created a homemade blog. The home page is now devoted to this blog, the entries to which are stored in a MySQL database. I built the blog with the ability to have an optional image for each entry, and there is a separate editing and posting interface that uses the wonderful FCK Editor.