horace.org

History of horace.org


Version 1.0

I started the Macross Site back in Fall 1995. This is the very first homepage I wrote. It was hosted at the university’s CS club. Being a long time addict to the anime series Macross, I decided to chose Macross as the theme of my homepage. I used frames, Java applets, VRMLs, anime-gifs and many other state-of-the-art visual gimmicks. I also wrote some CGI scripts in C++ for the site, including the guest book and a chat room. The design of the page is considerably messy and armature in today’s standard. However for a period of time, the site was an technology show room in the internet. The site is hand-coded using Textpad, a text editor.



Version 2.0

In Summer 1997, I designed to give a completely new look to the site. After 2 years, the old design was showing its age. The new layout looks more professional and is more user-friendly. New sections are added, such as macross gallery, music collection and a JavaScript shooting game, Operation Minmay. The Macross Internet Directory made this site has highest number of visits among all CS club websites. In early 1999, I mirrored the site at unspacy.net for about half a year. The unspacy.net was closed for now due to the limit of resources.



Version 3.0

Macross Site is renamed to horace.org in the new millennium. I’ll gradate from university this may and I foresee the need of having a permanent email and web address of my own, hence I acquired the horace.org domain in Dec 1999. The layout and content of site is re-designed to utilized new IE5 features. The site is created using Macromedia Dreamweaver 3. The site is far from complete and eventually abandoned.



Version 4.0

Since the burst of the dot.com bubble and the commercialization of the Internet, I no longer see the point of maintaining a fans site dedicate to Macross. The site has was closed for almost 2 years. During that time, my interest shift to writing articles on religion, philosophy and current affairs. I re-open the site as a forum for me to post my articles and exchange feed backs with my readers. I installed to PHPBB with a front page to serve latest article.



Version 5.0

PHPBB is a great forum software, but is a very bad blogging tool. I migrate to WordPress and horace.org is once again transformed from a forum into a blog. I developed the my own WordPress theme with PHP and AJAX as a learning exercise. I continue to post articles on my blog. For three years, I have at least one blog entry per day on average.



Version 6.0

Upgrade from WordPress 2 to WordPress 3 is a big change. My custom theme no longer works and I don’t have the time to maintain it. I switch to use out of the box theme and widgets to design the appearance of my blog. Besides writing the blog as usual, I also started my own wiki server for taking notes and ideas.

3 thoughts on “horace.org”

  1. 您好﹗我們正籌備一個專題節目,探討政府明年修例保護版權的影響,根據修例,未來將影片、音樂等上載,若對版權持有人造成影響,將列為刑事罪行。我們希望探討本港版權法例的鬆緊,希望採訪你的意見。希望你跟我聯絡。謝謝﹗

  2. 您好:

    我是台灣網路媒體關鍵評論網The News Lens的編輯鄭少凡,我們很欣賞您的文章,想跟您談合作轉載,不知您能提供email給我,我們於email上祥談?

    謝謝

    鄭少凡 Ken Cheng
    Editor
    關鍵評論網 The News Lens
    akenken@thenewslems.com

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