raw sewage history

The raw sewage name stems from its roots as a bulletin board system (BBS). Before the Internet reached its current proportions, PC users used modems to dial into other PCs to electronically communicate with others and share files. Although the raw sewage BBS was a tiny operation---one dialup node running on a 486 under DESQview---I put a lot of time and effort into making it a quality system. I drew up a lot of respectable "ANSI art" for my BBS. I also wrote custom add-on software: the BBS software was called PCBoard, and it came with its own development language, PPL (PCBoard Programming Language).

Eventually, I found enlightenment in free Unix-like operating systems for PCs, starting with Linux. I named my computer "sewage" to preserve the heritage of my bulletin board.

While at the University of Illinois, it came to my attention that I had some free webserver space available to me. I taught myself the basics of HTML and brought raw sewage to the web. In its first, second and third versions, raw sewage on-the-web was nothing more than a page of my favorite links---a glorified bookmarks page.

During the summer of 2001, I got an internship at Caterpillar. I was mostly doing web programming. I started by working in ASP, which is awful. Fortunaly, I had the power to use whatever system I wanted. So I started using PHP. Although they are conceptually the same, PHP, in my opinion, has every conceivable advantage over ASP. Furthermore, ASP's language is VBScript (actually any is allowed, but VBScript is the most common), where PHP has a syntax much like Perl and C. I became addicted to PHP programming, and decided it was time to make a more "substantial" version of raw sewage.

The raw sewage website has gone through several redesigns since its original inception, particularly since getting into PHP (as described above). As I try to make the site more substantial, I struggle with maintaining the overall structure, appearance and functionality. The responsibilities associated with administering a web site is usually termed "content management". There are several software packages available (content management systems) that automate this task. However, I would like to keep raw sewage as simple and portable as possible. At the same time, I don't want to spend too much time actually administering the site; I want the majority of my time to be spent on actual content. This is very challenging.