Do we have any "roadgeek" web developers?

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

I am just interested to know! I dabble in code myself!

[Scott5114]

A good chunk of the community was formed before there were things like Flickr and Imgur for hosting images, so back in the day pretty much every roadgeek had their own site that they posted photos to. A decent number of them are still around–look for the globe icon to the left of someone's post, under their avatar, and if they have a website it will show it.

I originally had a roadgeek website with lovingly handwritten XHTML, but I've since repurposed the domain for my business. The business website runs Wordpress (because fuck trying to code a shopping cart and payment gateway myself), but I wrote the theme for it (and all of the content, of course) myself.

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

A good chunk of the community was formed before there were things like Flickr and Imgur for hosting images, so back in the day pretty much every roadgeek had their own site that they posted photos to. A decent number of them are still around–look for the globe icon to the left of someone's post, under their avatar, and if they have a website it will show it.

I originally had a roadgeek website with lovingly handwritten XHTML, but I've since repurposed the domain for my business. The business website runs Wordpress (because fuck trying to code a shopping cart and payment gateway myself), but I wrote the theme for it (and all of the content, of course) myself.

Well, that's useful and interesting! I love hearing the past experiences of other individuals on the forum, and happy birthday Scott!

[webny99]

And happy birthday Scott!

99% certain the cake (and the age) in his profile are a total joke 

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

And happy birthday Scott!

99% certain the cake (and the age) in his profile are a total joke 

It appeared for me when I turned 18...?

[21stCenturyRoad]

And happy birthday Scott!

99% certain the cake (and the age) in his profile are a total joke 

Definitely not a joke. The cake is programmed to appear next to the age on a user's birthday.

[Thing 342]

Yes. See the GitHub link in my signature.

[kurumi]

Yeah; HTML, LAMP (mySQL/Perl), Java, JavaScript, a tiny bit of jQuery, Bootstrap, Python, Django. A mix of hobby stuff and "stuff we use internally at work but doesn't ship with the product".

[webny99]

And happy birthday Scott!

99% certain the cake (and the age) in his profile are a total joke 

Definitely not a joke. The cake is programmed to appear next to the age on a user's birthday.

Whoops... alrighty then. I don't believe I was active on my own birthday (which was in August) so I had no idea about that little detail.
Although I'm yet to be convinced he's only 28, as that would have put him at 19 when the forum started. 
In any case, happy late birthday, Scott, and I'm sorry for insinuating it was a joke 

[hotdogPi]

And happy birthday Scott!

99% certain the cake (and the age) in his profile are a total joke 

Definitely not a joke. The cake is programmed to appear next to the age on a user's birthday.

Whoops... alrighty then. I don't believe I was active on my own birthday (which was in August) so I had no idea about that little detail.
Although I'm yet to be convinced he's only 28, as that would have put him at 19 when the forum started. 
In any case, happy late birthday, Scott, and I'm sorry for insinuating it was a joke 

It is kind of a joke on Reddit, though. Your "cakeday" on Reddit is the anniversary of when you joined, not your actual birthday (which the website never asks for).

[jeffandnicole]

As Scott alluded to, I was one that learned HTML to create not only a roadgeek website, but also a personal one for myself so that no matter what computer I was on, I could get to it and see my favorite links and sites.

When Comcast did away with personal webpages, that ended everything I had done.  I have the source code saved somewhere.

[Scott5114]

Although I'm yet to be convinced he's only 28, as that would have put him at 19 when the forum started. 

...And?

For what it's worth, I graduated high school at 17, got my first gaming license at 19, and started my first business at 22.

[webny99]

Although I'm yet to be convinced he's only 28, as that would have put him at 19 when the forum started. 

...And?

I'm trying to envision myself, or someone else in my age group, as a forum administrator. IIRC, you've also managed a Burger King. You "seem" much older than that, that's all.

When I saw the cake (which I now know appears automatically), it seemed like your humor, to put the cake on there and have a random age going with it.

[hbelkins]

When I went to work for the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet in 1995, the Web was in its infancy. As the new kid on the block in Revenue's public information office, I was assigned to the task force for rolling out our agency's website. Eventually, I got tasked with helping develop and maintain it, and we were one of the first revenue and taxation agencies in the country to have a website and downloadable forms.

It was very simplistic by today's standards, but it was state of the art back then.

The site was maintained with MS FrontPage, but I had some HTML training, although the idea of manually coding a site when software is available to do the job gives me the creeps. Why do things the hard way? HTML coding is good for tweaking, but not for creating a site from front to back.

The Millennium Highway site was created using Claris Home Page, a cross-platform (Mac/PC) program.

When I went to KYTC, I took on the duty of maintaining the district's website. We used Dreamweaver. Several years ago, we migrated to SharePoint as a web authoring tool (yuck, yuck, gag) and recently moved up to SharePoint 2013, for which I will need extensive training. Needless to say, I am NOT a fan of SharePoint.

With the advent of Flickr, I rarely update the Millennium Highway site anymore. I have two years' worth of road trip photo pages and GPS logs that I need to add to the Millennium Highway Roadtrips page, but it's just a pain to do it anymore. Claris Home Page was discontinued and the old version won't run on the modern Mac OS, so I'm using an old version of Adobe GoLive CS2 that I came across, but any upgrades to my current Mac OS will break it.

Having come from the world of desktop publishing, I love the WYSIWYG capabilities of that platform. I started using PageMaker when Aldus was the publisher. There really needs to be a good WYSIWYG web development/HTML authoring program, and I don't know why no one was ever able to come up with anything that does web pages the way PageMaker, Quark X Press and InDesign do printed pages.

[vdeane]

NYSRoads is hand-coded HTML/CSS/PHP.  Formerly self-hosted, but I moved it to 1&1 a year ago to improve uptime reliability (I no longer need to worry about my IP address changing or power/internet outages, and I can actually shut down/restart my desktop if I want to).  I also have four perl scripts that are used to add photos to the site (one resizes them locally on my desktop, and the other three are run remotely to add photos, routes, and states to the MySQL database).  I'm actually debating whether to do a minor upgrade to the core code to integrate the desktop and mobile designs and potentially improve the page titling on the photo pages, as well as potentially upgrade from XHTML 1.1 to HTML 5 (and change the way I validate, since there is no "valid HTML 5" graphic).  I'd also like to add some more functionality to the photo gallery some day, but I'm not sure when/if it will ever get done; even adding rudimentary direction/ordering would seem like it would involve a LOT of work to add information manually to each photo, which is the whole reason I don't have it in the first place (those who have been following my site since it launched may remember that I tried this originally and gave up).

As for why someone would hand-code, it's probably easier to appreciate from the computer science background than the publishing background (basically, I just did it for the fun of it; same reason as the original self hosting).  On the plus side, anyone who actually looks at the source will notice that it's absolutely beautiful.

[freebrickproductions]

Although I'm yet to be convinced he's only 28, as that would have put him at 19 when the forum started. 

...And?

I'm trying to envision myself, or someone else in my age group, as a forum administrator. IIRC, you've also managed a Burger King. You "seem" much older than that, that's all.

When I saw the cake (which I now know appears automatically), it seemed like your humor, to put the cake on there and have a random age going with it.

I became an admin on another forum when I was 16.

I also help make pages for the website that the other forum is on, though we mostly use a pre-made page template that the original owner of the site had made.

[US71]

I dabbled a bit with the local SCA website, but it's been years so I'm way out of practice

[Eth]

I'm a software developer by trade, and web development has been my day job for about the last 3 1/2 years.

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

I am actually coding a portfolio website for my English class, while others are using drag and drop websites.


iPhone

[Scott5114]

As for why someone would hand-code, it's probably easier to appreciate from the computer science background than the publishing background (basically, I just did it for the fun of it; same reason as the original self hosting).  On the plus side, anyone who actually looks at the source will notice that it's absolutely beautiful.

My reasons for hand-coding my roadgeek website were 1) so that I could practice HTML, since I figured knowing it would come in handy 2) so that I could control things so they were just as I wanted them, and 3) because auto-generated HTML at the time put in a lot of garbage code that was often out of date, superfluous, or did not validate against the HTML spec (anyone else remember using the W3C HTML validators?)

That was fine in 2005, but people expect a certain level of polish and gee-whiz JavaScript chrome these days, and meeting those expectations while hand-coding is just way too time consuming. That, and I never really did find a good way to generate a header template that was transcluded on every page without having to use PHP anyway.

[Jim]

My web experiences date back to the mid 1990s when I installed the first web server at Union College.  Many years of maintaining my web site of pictures, which I continue to maintain with plain HTML though much is now automatically generated by Python code.  Then most recently, I'm the author of probably about 50% of the web-facing code currently in production in the Travel Mapping project.

[US71]

I am actually coding a portfolio website for my English class, while others are using drag and drop websites.

Maybe you can fix the sign generator? 

[TheArkansasRoadgeek]

I am actually coding a portfolio website for my English class, while others are using drag and drop websites.

Maybe you fix the sign generator? 

I'd have to have the source and I thought Alex sent it to "Matt"  for fixing?


iPhone

[Thing 342]

I am actually coding a portfolio website for my English class, while others are using drag and drop websites.

Maybe you fix the sign generator? 

Interestingly, I worked for a bit on a replacement written in React a while back, but didn't make much progress until school / work got in the way.

My current project is writing a CMS explicitly designed for storing and querying road photos as a replacement for my current WordPress setup.