I found a site called dynDns, or dynamic DNS, that allows me to host a website from my own PC. Unfortunately the upload (from my PC to someone else’s) is slow, only 56kbps (or so). I only have the personal cable modem account with a dynamic IP address and a slow uplink. Downloads to my PC, of course, scream

Anyway, a small program runs in the background and if my IP address changes, which it tends to do whenever I shut down the cable modem or something, it will publish the new IP to dynDns, and thus people can still access my site. Let me do a screen scrape and place my first attempt within these pages here.

So far its simply for fun. I am using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and C# to build a functional web site. So far though I’ve simply used it to build HTML and to add a simple calendar web control onto the page. I have only one link, and that is Language, which points to the SIL organization (something I looked up quickly just to check it out). I know nothing about SIL, but it’s an organization dedicated in some way to language-based development (here is the site: www.sil.org).

Under useful stuff I was going to have some Java clocks showing times around the world and a link to lock weather (a cookie would be stored on the local system containing the user’s Zip code—this should help me learn about cookies).

I wanted to develop a message board (I know, there are thousands out there), but to learn more about C# programming and to get familiar with MySQL (a somewhat free SQL database server) I thought it would be nice to toss together a configurable, easy to use and implement message board. Also I wanted to try throwing together a Blog (web-log) web application so that I could easily have it show my log (this log) in some way. Not sure how I’d do it. Perhaps I could use some Microsoft Word programming APIs, although I have no idea how.

I’m also thinking about building some Web Services and client apps (I have a sample in one of my books for playing blackjack where the game logic is on the remote web site as a service and a simple Windows client GUI uses it to play a game against a virtual dealer).

Anyway, time for bed.