Codecat

As you may have noticed: the site looks a bit different than before. I had the chance to increase my Codecat domain collection (now de, info, net, and org), switched to a new provider, installed WordPress, picked a really nice gallery plugin (NetxtGEN), tinkered a bit with some themes, and voilá.

The longer story? Well, when looking for a domain name back then, I wanted something "new" and something with "cats" *g* And came up with Codecat, as I was doing some programming at that time. All the US domains (com, org, net) were taken – guess I wasn’t as original as I hoped – but de and info were free.

Last month, I received a spam mail from Gary Willicott:

"Hi Holger, codecat.net to which you own the codecat.info will soon be released. I wondered if you desired to get hold of the .net If so, as an expert in the area of acquiring dropping domains I can help."

Needless to say, I felt no obligation to reply, but checked internic myself. Lo and behold, the net and org domain were really free.

Then I decided to amp my webpresence up a notch with a database and PHP. Webhoster in the past always wanted a sick amount of money for a  MySQL database and some PHP. I didn’t feel like shelling out the money, and server side includes suited me just fine.

Now I felt like I could try something else. So I picked a new hoster – MySQL + PHP can be had for little money by now – an registered net and org. With these toys available, I wanted to try some CMS/blog system.

Joomla is a nice CMS, but seemed a bit weak on the blogging side. WordPress is, of course, the system everyone and their aunt is using. Other strong contenders were Movable Type, which is now free to have but requires Perl (I like it but my hoster does not include it), Serendipity, and Drupal. Drupal’s main feature seemed to be the creating of e-books by a group of writers. Not my requirement.

Serendipity and WordPress were my candidates, and after biting my way through the template system of Serendipity, I switched to WordPress. Yes, Smarty is fine and dandy, but I wanted to have this site up and running this month…

Anyway, here is the result. All (most) of the "old" content has been already moved to the new system. Now the fun begins!