About Project'98

I was browsing the web in late 1998, probably in my dorm room at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville, and found Rob Wiskow's Project '97 site. He had made it for the Port Washington High School Class of 1997. I thought it was a cool idea, plus I needed something to help me "expand" my web design abilities.

To tell you the truth, I didn't create the site to get in contact with everybody. The people whom I wanted to keep in touch with, I was already basically contacting. But, I'm glad I did it and I hope I've helped everyone stay in touch.

So, I put together a cheesy little website (A archived version of the page in mid 1999) together. I asked Rob to borrow some programs that he had used to put his site together. I edited them to work with my site and there it was.

Years have gone by, students have signed up, and Project '98 has grown. Everything this site is powered by has been rewritten over and over and the site is now basically automatic. You can now update the database of info and the site uses it for multiple purposes.

If you would like one for your class, or another purpose, email me and I'll get right back to you.

Since the Project '98 site is public, the basis of the internet, a student's information will not be displayed until they have given me permission and submitted the required data. This can be done either by logging in editing the data or emailing me. This is the fifth major revision for Project '98.

Revisions and History (Click on the links to get more info on the item.)

  • Verison 1 - Late 1998 - I'm pretty sure that I just edited every student's page by hand for this one. Exciting stuff.
  • Version 2 - 1999 - Rob gave me a peice of Visual Basic software that would take a CSV file exported from Microsoft Excel and automatically write all of the pages. Then I could upload them all to the site. All info was updated manually by me.
  • Version 3 - 2001 - After learning some ASP at work I rewrote the site to use Microsoft Access and automatically grab the updated infofrom from there, dynamically. I still needed to update the database manually and re-upload it to the site, so it still wasn't perfect.
  • Version 4 - 2004 - After countless (though not too demanding) attempts to figure out a secure way to allow users to login and update their own information, I once again turned to Rob Wiskow at Project '97. He allowed me to freely use his PHP scripts that would connect to a MySQL database and allow users to login and update their own info, basically making the site automatic (except for making accounts.)
  • Version 5 - 2005 - Current - To polish my skills and to learn a new cutting-edge language, I completely rewrote the site in a up-and-coming progamming language called Ruby on Rails. The site still uses a MySQL database, but Ruby on Rails makes programming it a whole lot simpler. Users can still update their own info and even create their own users (though, I will probably still make them manually so no "bad people" get in.)