Technical Information

The Purple Martin Site at www.neun.com/martin has been in operation since 1996. The site uses a virtual server provided by an internet service provider (ISP). This operating system is linux. I also use linux at home to assemble the pages. My current ISP is 1 and 1. I have changed my ISP many times, but the domain/address or URL has not changed much over the years.

You may save the address (URL) of any page on this site as a "Favorite". You may then return later. Over time, however, most sites including this one will reorganise to a point that old, saved addresses will no longer work. As an example, I began using server side includes early in 2001 and most page name suffixes shifted from ".html" to ".shtml". Then in 2005, I dropped the SSI technology as I began to use more PHP. When trying to use an old "Favorite" URL that begins to fail, always trim off the page names and try the root name. For example, www.neun.com/martin/avedate.html might fail, but www.neun.com/martin/ still works fine.

The entire web site is written in HTML version 4.0 with nearly all pages being represented via PHP.

Much of what I have learned about Web site construction has come from these three sources: Looking at other Web sites; reading books, and the WDVL The WDVL was a great resource for me in my beginning days as a Web developer.

I copy web pages (files) to my web site via gFTP.

This site uses a modified version of FormMail.php v5.0 by Ai Graphics and Joe Lumbroso, http://www.aigraphics.com, http://www.dtheatre.com, http://www.dtheatre.com/scripts/ for both reports and comments.

The scout report map uses the Yahoo! ajax GeoRSS API. Individual reports are appended to an XML file of GeoRSS form. The file is submitted to Yahoo! via their API.