My homepage history

Finally I had some time to re-develop my webpage using content management systems. Back in the old days while studying for my electrical engineering degree at Purdue University, while working as a computer lab consultant, I learned html coding - at that time only a few of us had our own personal web site. Back then in Mid 90's yahoo just launched and a few universities had web pages and the browser of choice was Mosaic.

With senior classes and with work for survival, I did not had the chance to update my web site frequently. I occasionally changed/updated my web pages using Java and other development tools like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc.

Recently, I wanted to develop an e-commerce website for my small business and again started looking into different options. I played with cubecart, OSCommerce, Zencart a littlebit but I needed something robust and powerful and more interactive with my clients and users as the front end of the webpage and started looking into CMS solutions.

And here I am developing my personal website with Drupal. I actually started out with Joomla which is what I will continue to use for my business sites and wanted to give Drupal a try for my personal sites.

I have developed several websites with both Drupal and Joomla and enjoying the unlimited potentials of these two packages. I have a xen virtualized Dell server running in my home (I also played with OpenVZ a littlebit) and anytime I want to create another Linux server I can just create a slice. I am planning on publishing a step by step instruction of installing joomla on a CentOS soon.

One other area where I have learned a great deal is to setup a VOIP softswitch running on CentOS. I then created another website where voip phone card users can signup, check their balances, recharge and submit problem tickets all done in Drupal. I linked the website to my VOIPswitch server's MySQL database to pull out all the user data - this way the voipswitch is offloaded from serving those services as well.

All these open source is really interesting and I am big time open source fan.