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Go back to the front page. There's not much of interest there, though
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Why did I make this site? What do I plan for it? Does any of it matter?
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Find out a bit about me. Maybe more than you want to...
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What DVD's do I own, and what do I think of them?
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Find out a little more about yourself. Maybe a little too much!
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Why BenQuick.net?

BenQuick.net, then. Why did I make it? It's an updated, more technically challenging, version of Benquick.co.uk / .com. Most of the content is generated 'on the fly'. That is, is all parsed through a script then bundled into a big ball of HTML to be finally thrown in the general direction of your web-browser (In your case, CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)).

I still have many plans for this site, though. I want to port over the HTML tutorial from BenQuick.com, along with the MySQL stuff, now that I understand it a bit better

You may, or may not, have noticed that some links on this site point to a .qml file-type. This is something I originally implemented as a hacky solution to a simple problem, but I lacked the knowledge to implement anything better. I want to get rid of that, eventually. I also want to interact with the database more than I currently do. So far, database interaction is limited to the index page (The latest life update), the section on my life (This is all pulled from a database) and the DVD stuff (Again, all pulled from the database). I want to migrate the two quizzes into a propper database. Currently it's all flat-file stuff

The main reason for the .net over the .com or .co.uk was the host. Whilst the host of the .co.uk and .com was more than sufficient at first, I quickly outgrew it. So, .net was born, and I moved hosts - Better webstats, more server-side functionality. That kind of thing. I originally bought an Orange Triangle at the same time as this domain. The Orange Triangle was going to be the technical side of things, and this was going to be the fun. It didn't turn out like that, though. Maybe one day it will. Possibly around the same time I update the announcements on BenQuick.com ;-)

Website syndication is something I'm interested in at the moment. Although I don't yet have a feed from life it will appear in the future. Just not yet sure how far in the future this will be. At the moment I'm attempting to implement a newsfeed here. Something like Google's but far less complex. Just the current headlines from a select few sites (Possibly even more select when I find out how few of them offer an RSS feed!)

Generally, I want this site to be something I'm pleased with. Not in a way that the viewer will ever see, but on a technical level. I want my Perl scripts to all use strict; simple things like that. None of it's important, it's just a challenge. However, to complete this challenge, I must learn more Perl, and better understand it

I also have a totally seperate website which I mainly decided to do as a project to learn how to interact with databases (in this case, MySQL) via perl. It seems to work pretty well. But, I want to turn it into a website that people can use and use well. There are so many features missing at the moment. Lost passwords, staying logged in, searches, stats, disclaimers. The true list is much longer, but I normally lose interest around the 'searches' stage. But, I haven't lost interest in the site - It cost me enough! :o)

My biggest two limitations are

  1. Time
  2. Knowledge
Time, I can work around. But, this is difficult without the knowledge to be productive with

The task?

Learn

Enough ramble, I'd guess. So, catch up with me, or I guess you could go elsewhere, if you wanted :-)

Last updated - Thu Oct 4 22:13:53 2007

© 2001, 2002 Ben Quick. Send me E-mail if you have questions or comments. All Rights Reserved <- Does anyone know what that means?!