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Comment by susam

6 days ago

This is pretty much how I began developing websites too. Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP.

It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications.

Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.

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susam

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lazarus01  5 days ago

I remember ASP (application service provider, before cloud became synonymous with hosting), you are making me nostalgic. Back then I was in sales, I was selling real time inventory control, CRM and point of sale systems distributed over Citrix Metaframe in a secure datacenter. Businesses were just starting to get broadband connections. I would have to take customers to the datacenter to motivate them to let us host their data. Eight years later, google bought the building for $1.8b and eventually bought adjacent buildings as well.

  • susam  5 days ago

    We are talking about different ASPs. I am referring to Active Server Pages (ASP), the server-side scripting language supported by Personal Web Server (PWS) and Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows. It is similar to PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP) and Java Server Pages (JSP) but for the Windows world. I began developing websites with ASP. Over the years, I dabbled with CGI, PHP, JSP, Python, etc. before settling on Common Lisp as my preferred choice for server-side programming.