So much for SSL. I can't find a free certificate provider who provides certificates with expiry dates greater than 90 days in the future. I don't feel like writing automation to deal with it, so back to HTTP we go. That we live in 2017 and don't have a good free way to supply public websites with certificates is astonishing. Once IIS supports automatic certificate renewal via e.g. letsencrypt.org, I'll add it back.
This website lives in the stone age. Because I (Matt) am now gainfully employed at Microsoft, it's now hosted at http://www.windowsazure.com. I've enabled SSL throughout, which will probably prove to be more effort than it's worth, and we have a much more robust photo gallery in operation. Nevertheless, thanks to the magic of standards compliance, this website still seems to work just as it did when first built. Hooray.
Reoptimized EVERY photograph in the Pictures section. All photos will download faster now.
Alright, I think I've squashed all standards-compliancy bugs :). I updated some CGI programs, and threw up some new pictures from our recent trip to Glacier National Park. Feel free to contact us if you would like any part of the web page redesigned, changed, or otherwise modified.
Some standards-compliancy issues (read: bugs) remain. All pages do display properly in Mozilla and Internet Exploder, but they are not all XHTML 1.0 compliant. I'll deal with the problem eventually but not for a while. :) It's not a particularly pressing matter.
The website has been uploaded to the remote server at SoftCom and is now accessible to everyone. There were some considerable glitches related to the manner in which MS IIS implements SSI (server side includes). After a couple hours of dinking around, I finally got everything reworked. Contact me if there are any bugs/broken links etc.
Pictures page updated. It's even a little better than the old one, because now we can include a text description of each set of pictures. This will make it easier to understand what the pictures are of. You will also notice a date in the lower right hand corner of every page. This date is when the page was last modified.
Massive site overhaul. I've brought all the pages up-to-date with the XHTML 1.0 specification. Naturally, I had started this process some months ago, and now there is the newer XHTML 1.1 specification. Can't win. You should find the site has a somewhat refreshed look. In the background, I've eliminated much of the dependence on Microsoft technology. The CGI scripts are still written in C++ compiled using MS Visual C++, and there is still the fractal animating ActiveX control. There are no more ASP (active server pages), VBScript, or cookies (forced on the website by MS IIS). I still need to update the pictures page.
We've gotten our e-mail system switched over to an "@renzelmann.com" system entirely. Only use addresses @renzelmann.com
Notice: I am not dead. I'm just a bit of a loss regarding what I should put on the site. If you have any suggestions or things you'd like to contribute, please, do get in touch. It would be nice to put up some more pictures, particularly of the fam. :) Feel free to send away.
The frames have been removed. Hopefully this makes it easier to navigate the site. I personally like it better.
I've been doing other things and haven't worked on the web page lately. I tried to enhance the consistency of the site by reworking the Cascading Style Sheet it uses. I will continue trying to make the site look better on both Netscape andInternet Explorer. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the frames the site uses. I might accomplish this using "Server Side Includes" but I'm not sure yet.
Re-worked the pictures page so the pictures are divided into categories. These categories should help keep things both organized and fast loading. Prior to breaking the pictures apart into categories, there were a great deal of thumbnails that would have to be loaded upon viewing the page. Now there are far fewer.
Been working on an ActiveX control to animate the fractals. There is now an "Animation" link next to each fractal picture. Clicking it will load another page which will display the fractal and animate it. Unfortunately, it only works with BMP type fractals. Writing my own software to decode more advanced compression methods seemed like overkill. Since I estimate the number of hits to the fractal page to be about one per year, I do not feel this is a significant problem.
Added a fractals link to the left frame with some pictures and thumbnails. Updated my personal web page, my dad's web page, and my mom's web page. My mom claims she will update it for herself in the future. I'll believe it when I see it.
More internal changes. Nothing substantial. I need to think of additional graphics to add. The site is not that colorful. I changed the pictures page so all the pictures with a thumbnail specified display a thumbnail. Any picture that I didn't create a thumbnail for will simply display a link to the picture. This should make it easier to find pictures you are looking for.
Updated some internal parts of the web site to make it easier for me to maintain things. I am now able to delete and edit any file on this web site from the Internet. I also made it possible for me to delete posts in the forums via the Internet. I worked on my personal page quite a bit. I need to upload some files to it now.
Not much happening. I was on vacation for a week :-) I updated the pictures page with photographs from the trip. We will be adding more pictures in the future of our house and of us. I also added a "Contacts" link which should make it easier for everyone to send us e-mail.
Added security to the upload files section. It is, after all, a sensitive area. I would hate to have someone upload many large files. Re-done the navigation bar on the left so it does not use images. This speeds download times. Unfortunately, the mouse-over effects do not work on Netscape. If you're using Netscape, the links will appear like regular links. Only in IE do they function as intended. There is no way around this except to use images (which are very combersome).
Re-worked the navigation bar on the left by replacing the hyperlinks with images. This seems to add a bit of liveliness to the site. I also created a new picture at the top of the main page welcoming everyone to renzelmann.com. The Incoming Files folder works better than it did, and is almost ready for primetime. I enhanced the online editing capability further still. It is now more secure and offers more options. I am very happy with how it works. I still need to get WS_FTP to synchronize properly.
Enhanced the online editing capabilities and changed the password system around. Hopefully the new system will prove to be more effective. It is now possible for me to password protect any page with relative ease.
I'm trying to figure out how to get WS_FTP to let me synchronize the pages on my computer with the web server. I am having difficulty understanding the time difference between our computer and the server. It sounds like a simple problem to overcome, but the server does some pretty strange stuff to the date and time stamps on the files.
Enhanced the forums with a few small modifications and fixes. Added an upload file option, though it's not available to the world for "security reasons."
I had to work out some glitches with the web server. The server was configured such that the ASP scripts I have on it (which display the forums for example) weren't allowed to write data. The result was that the forums would not work. If you tried to post a message to the forums yesterday, you were probably presented with an error message. This problem has been solved, and everything on the site should work as expected, with the exception of the e-mail addresses. I still need to get the email addresses working, so don't try sending to "whatever@renzelmann.com" just yet.
I finished all the important parts of the forum. We will then be able to have a forum for just the Renzelmann family in addition to a forum shared with the world. I also re-worked the main page so it uses frames. It looks better and will allow for extra functionality in the future. www.renzelmann.com now resolves to this website, so we're officially online!
I created a forum that appears to function. It has a few glitches, but it seems to work well. It will be possible to run multiple forums using the same copy of this software.
I started working on this web page. I installed Front Page 2000 and setup a framework for the website. ASP appeared to offer a lot in the way of features, so we decided to go with a web server that supported ASP. The web server we decided on was SoftCom. Visit www.softcomca.com if you would like to look into them for your own website.