I think it is probably useful to mention a little history of Thomo and the Web. Thomo’s first Hole in the web appeared in October, 1996, created when the family and I were living in Norway and hosted on Scandinavia Online. It was brief, consisting of about 10 pages in total, and most of those pages are still embedded away here in the current Thomo’s Hole (the Sumerian Army one is one in particular and the some of the discussion of why Australia is on Top is another).
After Norway, the Hole moved back to Australia and was hosted at Bigpond (some errant pages from that site are still sitting on Bigpond’s Servers). This was in January 1998. It resided there for some time until it was moved to Compuserve in March 1999 when I started travelling more again. It resided on Compuserve until 2002. I was working and pretty much living in Korea and so we hosted it locally. The reason for the move in Korea was that we had a permanent 24×7 connection there (unlike Senator Richard “It’s all done for the pornography” Alston’s ill-educated thoughts, the Broadband connections to the population of Korea are a government sponsored move and more Koreans have access to Broadband Internet connections than Australians have ANY connection to the Internet).
The move to coldie.net is the most recent, having occurred around September 2002. Jeffro has space on a server in the states and so the Hole is hosted from there. March 2003 is when the site was first moved from an HTML type page with lots of work for maintenance to a PHP based Content Management System PostNuke. This made it much much easier for me to manage the content and was reflected in the amount of content that was added between then and early 2005.
More importantly, there was a framework set up where I could hang up my ftp client and do everything through a web-based interface.
The Hole throbbed and thrived!
Then blogging really became popular. In late 2004 I started playing with Microsoft Spaces and later Live Spaces. In early 2005 I was in Korea, Kazakhstan and then took a job in Mongolia. I used that blog to let my friends know what I was doing and that version of Thomo’s Hole developed a wide readership, covering as it did, the life of a foreigner in Mongolia.
That version of Thomo’s Hole remained in parallel with the older Hole until 19 January 2006 when I had moved sufficient of both that blog and the old Thomo’s Hole across to here. Now I am using WordPress as a combined Blog and Home Page and continuing Thomo’s Hole. The only issues that I can see at the moment is that using WordPress, a wonderful blogging tool, I am a little more restricted in providing Page access. I think I just need to think that through though and maybe hack some PHP to acheive the result. Really, I want some static part on the Home Page AND the blog there as well. We shall see.
Microsoft’s browsers seem to have some issues with the PHP in WordPress as well, especially Internet Explorer 7 (IE6 does as well but by and large it is not too bad). All other browsers tested work fine. I also experimiented a little with Blogger as a replacement. It was nice but I still prefer WordPress. All Blogger entries have been migrated to here.
So now, at the time of updating this (19 February 2007), I have had a piece of the Internet for coming up to 11 years. Thomo’s Hole will continue to be updated. In the meantime, look around and enjoy the Hole.
