Gav's World : History Of GavsWorld

History of Gav's World

GavsWorld (even before I registered GavsWorld.net) started life as a very plain looking website back in 1997. It was written using Netscape Composer, which was part of the newly released Netscape Communicator, suite and produced the HTML code automatically. I remember the novelty of producing a rainbow affect with the letters of GavsWorld - oh to look back and laugh!!!

In fact... you can too, since it's been getting archived since 2003!

The website was occasionally updated with information - mainly about my Renault 5 GT Turbo, but nothing really became of it. The search engines of the time eventually found and indexed it resulting in some other R5GTT owners asking questions about what I'd done to the car, which is why I still have those pages now.

After several years of contemplation, and a decade of a very amateur looking web site, I finally got around to giving GavsWorld a bit of a face lift.

So, I give you ... Gav's World v2.0 :-) ... which went "live" on the 11th of December 2008.

Luckily, in the time between the first incarnation and this one, I'd become a dab hand at writing active web pages using PHP, so I made that the basis of the new website. So not only was I going to re-format the site content, but I also had to write all the software to drive the website.

This makes the new website even easier for me to maintain: the software searches for all page content and automatically produces the page list that you see in the opposite pane. The style of the website is maintained through the use of Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS). I've also taken a lot of time and effort to make the generated XHTML nicely indented (right click and view the source code to see what I mean). More importantly, the whole site adheres to the W3C coding standards for web pages (see the icons at the bottom of the page list that you can click to re-validate each and every page).

The new look website was so popular that I had requests from various people about the software that drives the website, so I decided to make the software available for download, free of charge (for non-commercial use).

This spawned another website - one with full documentation on how to use my website template software.

One downside of all the hits from workmates was the fact that our IT overlords, CSC, decided that it was too popular for a non work related website, so limited its access to lunch time only!