ballfamily.name website

site background

I've had some questions about how this site is put together, so I'm posting this article for the curious.

pre-web history

I've maintained an on-line system since the mid-1980's. The first publicly available system was a dial-up bulletin board system with one phone line. This system, The Precedent (aka Everett Opus), could host one connection at a time, included a significant library of computer utilities, was a member of FidoNet (1:343/9.0), and was how Anne and I met in 1989. She left me a note and the rest is history. The Precedent operated through the mid-1990's.

history

Originally named, "Gracevideo.com", the website was launched in 1997. I was volunteering video production services for Christian non-profit agencies and wanted a site to host background information. GraceVideo was one of several ideas, but seemed to most elegantly capture the purpose. Since that time, the video gear has slowly ground to a halt, requiring more financial backing that I am able to provide. However, the website has morphed into our family site. Who knows: perhaps we’ll find ourselves able to perform this service again in the future.

By 2006 the website had hosted family stories and images for several years, so it was rebranded as, "Ballfamily.name". Although the .name suffix isn't in wide use yet, it seems to capture our site purpose.

technology

The site runs at a commercial hosting service. The host system is on a LINUX-based computer. The presentation software is an open source document management system named Drupal. The style sheets and other supporting files have been modified (using my favorite HTML editor: Notepad++) to present a clean, easy to navigate interface. I’m trying to maintain a simple, but capable site. This site would be considered a LAMP installation: LINUX, Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (which is how Drupal works). The LAMP installations are becoming more and more popular due to their inexpensive cost, high performance, and decent ability to scale up for heavier loads.

hosting

Ballfamily.name is hosted by Hostgator. I have found Hostgator to be a pretty good hosting service. I moved to this service in December 2007 - I'll post more information as time passes. My initial thoughts: very fast system, great user support, basic site tools... works for me!

other administrator background

I'm still learning PHP, so I haven't done much to customize the function of the site. I went to high school in the dark ages... first in Central Florida at Oviedo High School, then at the Tehran American School in Tehran, Iran. They didn't even have electric typewriters at schools in those days; certainly no computers there!

After high school I took a shot at radio broadcasting - a vocation that still tugs at my heart.

After a few years on small radio stations (KIQS, Willows, California, KORT, Grangeville, Idaho, KOZE, Lewsiton, Idaho) I joined the US Navy as a broadcast journalist. I purchased my first PC in 1982 - an IBM PC clone: The Columbia MPC-1600. I was attending the Defense Information School (DINFOS) in Indianapolis for year while attending journalism classes.

My programming experience started in the mid-1980's at Misawa Air Force Base, in northern Japan. I was working as a US Navy journalist (after my first assignment on board the USS Midway, CV-41, deployed out of Yokosuka Japan - KWAY-FM and KMID-TV - where I anchored the television newscast, shot ENG stories, and even built a new radio studio) at the Armed Forces Radio and Television (AFRTS) station - FEN 1560 (Far East Network). Our station received a CP/M based Z-80 computer that included dBase II. I started teaching myself dBase right away. Soon we had a clone of the IBM PC/XT. I purchased a copy of Clipper, a dBase compiler, and began writing a radio station library program for our local shows. It worked pretty well!

Since then I attended college, worked for Boeing, Microsoft, Liberty Medical, Starbucks, and several other companies - currently I'm back at Microsoft, after an 11 year hiatus, working on software for healthcare.

closing

Hopefully this page answers your questions about the site. See also aboutus.org

Thanks for visiting! Dave Ball, web geek.