Epistula
Weblog Engine, Nodes Organiser, Terribly Exciting System.
Epistula is the name of the system behind Aquarionics.
At it’s heart, it’s just a database structure, and methods to access it.
History:
My first website used frames. It was on Geocities. It sucked. It is no more.
The graphics were made in Real3D on the amiga, the HTML stolen from a magazine coverdisc, the text… well, some of the text is around on Aquarionics 🙂 Soon I moved to easyspace (when .net magazine gave me 50mb of space. Twice) and Aquarion: The Website was born.
Aquarion the website was a three-column table with six pages and four subsites, one of which was follow that game, another was Greyscale, one a more personal home site (with a photograpic tour of my house!) with rollovers on the menus, a blue and white colourscheme, and not a great deal of content. It moved from easyspace to netmanor and finally to my home are on BTInternet, by which time I was using Javascript to include the menu system. Ick. It lasted until the end of Decemeber 1999, because on the 27th December 1999, I registered Aquarionics.com
Aquarionics was born, and with it I started using server side includes. It had all the old content with a new upside-down L navigation system. I started writing a diary, before I discovered blogger via a Sims Fansite and started using it, with gradually nicer and nicer designs…
The system for Aquarionics worked as follows, The header – containing all navigation – was called “header.shtml”, the footer was called “footer.shtml”, and each file in the main directory (“discworld.shtml”, for example, consisted of the following:
<!-- INCLUDE FILE="header.shtml" --> <!-- INCLUDE FILE="htmls/discworld.html" --> <!-- INCLUDE FILE="footer.shtml" -->
Why didn’t I just put the contents of the file in the middle? Don’t know. Glad I didn’t though, it made converting everything to database much easier. Anyway, I continued to blog blog away, failing and passing exams and stuff, until September 2001, when Pennyhost – my host, who had been bought out by a bigger fish – started to suck for support. So I packed up the site, and moved to beehost.net, where I could use PHP…
And PHP I did indeed use, I founded Klind/Klide/Kewl (now known as Epistula) on the foundations of proper webloging, mySQL, and not having to see if Blogger was up all the time.
Aquarionics 3.5 is a minor rethink. The diary has been split into being a diary and a weblog, with more sections coming soon. I’ve no idea what happens next 🙂