Web Site Info
Updated 25-July-2007, way too late at night...

• The site was first posted in February of 2004.
• Cassandra writes all the Newsletter text on her Palm Pilot Tungsten C. Chris runs that text through MS Word spellchecker before rendering the newsletter into a web page.
• Chris codes the site the old fashioned way, with a text editor. His preferred editor is the very robust UltraEdit.
• Version 1.0 used HTML and CSS. It made use of frames and had both a "left-handed" and "right-handed" orientation because Cassandra & Chris (left and right handed, respectively), had differing opinions on layout. The overall layout kept a menu on the bottom and paired the newsletter and related photos side-by-side onscreen.
• Version 2.0 came about in April of 2003. Cassandra, having recently acquired a Palm Pilot with web-surfing capabilities, found that a) the frames made it hard to view the pages; b) hyperlinks to external sites, which opened in a new browser window, were useless as the Palm browser didn't support this functionality. So, Chris added a third navigation option, which rendered external links in the same window and seperated newsletter text from related pictures.
• Cassandra hand-drew the yurt logo used in the current version.
• Version 3.0 came about in early 2005. The site is based on the look and feel of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal product, which Chris has worked with a number of times on varied client projects. Chris had been thinking about making the site dynamic and easier to code, reusing various bits of code as much as possible. Version 2.0 makes use of server-side includes, whereby certain code is contained within a seperate file and that code is "included" into the web page when that page is called by clicking a hyperlink. This very page, for example, has an include for:
  • the header, including the yurt and logo images
  • the navigation tabs across the top (news, photos, links, etc)
  • the menu to the left
  • the tables that surround the text in this white area
  Anything that can be reused is put in a text file and used in an include statement within the HTML file. Thus, if you look at the URL, you'll see that the files are actually using the .shtml extension, which allows the use of the include statement. Includes aren't the greatest of technology, but it works. The site also uses Javascript, CSS, HTML, and Perl.
• Once Version 3.0 is stable, Chris hopes to incorporate use of MySQL and PHP.
• The site was hosted by Real Pro Host, running on Linux, until 5/24/2005
• The site changed hosts on 5/24/05 to Locomotive Media, who's servers are wind powered.
• Version 4.0 saw the relocation of the site to the yippee.cc domain as well as the new host
• Version 5.0 came about mid-2006 when Chris found a java script photo viewer. The "journal" format marks this new version, which has Site Journal entries followed by a series of pics from the camera and Cassandra's phone-cam. Chris is now building pages generally by month, using a variety of tools that help the pages come to life faster. He hopes to, ultimately, develop a really cool Java app that will eliminate the need for multiple tools, but that's a ways off as he is still a newbie at Java programming.
• Version 5.1 saw a change in back-end servers and tools. If you see anything funky, blame it on geeks.