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Wickett 1.0: the early years

Wickett.org 1.0: the early years

Wickett.org came to life in 1997. Changes in ISP's resulted in our e-mail addresses changing 6 times in 7 months. It was time for stability. And since we had a domain name, we might as well put up a website.

The first incarnation was static HTML living on a FrontPage enabled server. Groovy! So groovy, in fact, that it still lives.

Wickett.org 2.0: the pMachine years

The first "fancy" wickett.org ran on pMachine. Now available as an open source platform, pMachine is incredibly fast and has some nice features. I really should apply some of my current understanding of css and html layouts to a pMachine site. I cut my teeth on building the holy grail - the table-less css layout building pMachine sites.

Wickett.org 3.0: the Mambo period

Some sites I was maintaining needed some features that pMachine didn't provide. Mambo seemed like a great choice. And it might have been. But development of Mambo fractured. Bugs and security holes popped out of every corner. Mambo had to go.

Wickett 4.0: bitweaver digs in

Wickett.org 4.0: bitweaver digs in

Mambo still lived on for some sites I maintained, but it grew more and more unruly and prone to hacks. Some sites I managed to talk into using alternatives. The Miata site became forum only.

A friend suggested I play with bitweaver. It was a tad slow, but it had all the features I needed, and I learned a lot about page design building the Wickett 4.0 layout. In fact, I liked the layout so much, I kept it! The 4.0 site is also still living at least until the next time a mandatory (read: security related) upgrade for bitweaver comes out.

Wickett.org 5.0: Drupal rhymes with "Roople"

I've been recommending Drupal for new sites and have built quite a few over the past few years. I've been meaning to convert Wickett for quite a while, but the cobbler's kids usually do go barefoot. Drupal properly configured runs rather faster than bitweaver, and it has some modules that do a better job at presenting some info than the stock bitweaver modules.

One of my frustrations has been finding a base site template to build from - as is frequently a concern when using content management systems. Zen themes were a godsend. Suddenly, I had a true and proper blank slate to start from, and within an hour, I had the foundation of the design you see here now up and running.

True to form, it was keep this site up-to-date-ish for a few years, then take a year off. Facebook seemed to do the trick for a while - especially since I kept thinking I'd finish the refresh of the back end I just got around to.

So last time around, about 3 years ago, I completely redesigned the site. New guts. New look. I mentioned that the car guys calling changing the curtains. They'll be getting a curtain change soon once vBulletin 4.0 goes gold.

I'm still quite fond of the look. So I've kept it, but over the past few months (color me slow), I migrated all the content into a new backend system. Mostly because the sites I maintain for the office, clients and others are on this system. Easier to keep one tool up to date, you see. Obviously, some links have broken - not that anyone ever gets to this site from search engines.

Some content is hiding at the moment - mostly recipes, but a couple of old techno articles are also hiding.

Wickett is now pushing 17 years old and still ready to kick butt, if you're curious...

The folks at MME call it changing the curtains when I redo any of the graphics on our site. At this point, they might accuse me of changing the curtains if I just updated the content on the main site. On the other hand, our sports car forums are alive and well. Of course, if you were to click over there, you'd see that the site is in horrid need of some freshening. But that's OK. We like fast page loads and all that good stuff.

But that's enough about the web site people actually visit...

If you've visited here more than once, you've certainly noticed that it's just remotely possible that we keep our recipes here. And we do. It's a darned handy place to keep them. Heck... I wish all my friends would start keeping their recipes here!

And to that end, it's awfully handy to have an easy way to print recipes. I try to keep up with the content management packages floating around in the ether, and in my latest traversal of software tree, I found the package that I'm using now. And what sold me? I accidentally printed a page off the bitweaver.org site and noticed that it printed only the content - none of the headers or navigation menus. I liked it. I'd set that up once on another system, but I'd never gotten around to creating a style for our previous system that was conducive to such magic tricks. For you techies... I'm a big fan of tableless CSS site layouts, and this, by gum, is one. And an easy to modify one, at that.

And so, after some education, teething pains and graphic work, here's our new look. And, to be honest, I'm rather fond of the new look. At least until I get bored with it.

Thanks for stopping by!