Our frequent visitors have been coming to tinkleflick.com for almost three years. That’s right, three years!!! Noah will turn three on January 9, 2005, and it was only a few weeks before January 9, 2003, when Ralph was stuck on a lengthy conference call at work. With nothing else to do but listen to a bunch of lawyer and accountants babble on about something or other, a question came to mind: ‘I wonder if www.tinkleflick.com is taken?’. Of course, the name was available and after entering his credit card number and setting up a basic, static page, tinkleflick.com was born. That first generation site was up for about a week before Ralph was dissatisfied with it.
Next up: Microsoft’s Front Page. Like everything Microsoft makes, FrontPage is clunky, creates bloated code and, of course, really only works with other Microsoft stuff. However, FrontPage is pretty easy to use and is widely adopted, so there are a lot of template websites available that can allow a new user to make a pretty fancy site. The second generation site looked pretty good and was the vehicle that we used to announce Noah’s arrival. Ralph’s family was traveling that week for his grandmother’s birthday in Ohio and the website provided them with their first images of their new grandchild. The problem with the second generation site was that it was static meaning it had to be updated and uploaded manually. This was totally unacceptable to Ralph who wanted a database-driven dynamic site with more fancy stuff (like flash graphics). Unfortunately, Ralph was still in his MBA program, had a newborn at home and switched jobs. The summer of 2003 was targeted for the development of the third generation site.
The summer of 2003 came and went and nothing was done. The fall of 2003 included Ralph’s four week stint in the hospital with meningitis. So, along with the second year of the MBA program, no progress was made on the website. In 2004, with the meningitis episode, a major advancement in Noah’s sleep pattern and the toughest part of the MBA program behind him, Ralph started working in earnest on the third generation website. The new website came online during the summer of 2004. It was written in PHP with a MySQL database background driving it. It looked a lot better, was easier to update and had a ton of new features. The only problem was that it was difficult to maintain because all of the code was custom-written. As a result, about half of the time available to update the site was spent maintaining the code, reducing the amount of time for content. The content frequently went stale and some of the fancy features never were implemented.
So, in October 2005, Ralph decided that it would be best to find something that would allow the flexibility and dynamic content of the third generation site but would be easier to maintain. The website had basically become a blog with a sort-of mockumentary news look and feel to it. With the explosion of the popularity of blogs, there are a ton of off-the-shelf systems available to create and maintain personal blogs. We settled on WordPress, an open source system based on PHP and MySQL which allows Ralph to tinker with the code but doesn’t require nearly as much code-time. The downside is that the site is not as fancy. So, we traded some fancy features for a much more manageable website. We hope that you like it.