The Evolution of Lee's Fishing Page

Hi All, I thought it would be nice to give a little history of the evolution of Lee's Fishing Page.  Below you will read how this started as something simple and grew into the site it is today.

The Evolution of Lee's Fishing Page

By Lee Goldsmith

Lee's Fishing Page

2001

Lee's Fishing Page started out to be nothing more then a simple web site hosted by my Internet Service Provider at the time, that was Point South in Sanford Maine.  The year was 2001 and Point South would allow you 10 megs of disk space to host a site. 

First I needed a domain name so I used "NameSecure" for that, back then $35.00 a year to register a domain name. 

First Software package i used.

Cute Site Builder

2004

Total Choice Hosting

By now I had re-upped the registration for my domain and I now only pay about $8 a year for long term registration.  Total Choice Hosting has come a long way over the years I have been using them as my host.  First they upped the disk space to 1400 megs and now I have 10 gigs of space and more transfer space then I will ever use in a month.  Again all for $44 a year.  They grandfathered all "Starter Host" packages to the same rate.  The new rate is not hard to take though, $5.95 a month or $55 a year.

I still was using Cute Site Builder and plodding along until I discovered CMS (Content Management Software).  My host has a package call Fantastico De Luxe.  They have several CMS packages to choose from so I started looking at them.

phpWebSite Developer

I looked at about 3 or 4 packages at the start, and then settled on phpWebSite.  It was a good package and easy to use, but it lacked some very essential plugins that I wanted.  But I used it because the Fantastico program would do the install on my server, good idea at the time but i don't recommend it now.  Doing an install from scratch is the best way to get everything right, right in the beginning.  More on this later.  I used phpWebSite for about a year and then thought that there must be something better out there, so back to Fantastico and I then discovered GeekLog (gl for short).

GeekLog software

2006

This package had better plugins and one that was just fantastic Media Gallery, written for gl by Mark Evens.  Also there was an integrated forum as well, now I did not need to use other outside software with my main software for the site.  I have used Simple Machines and phpBB for a forum and Gallery software for albums and the biggest problem was updating everything as new things are added.  Now enter glFusion, this is the culmination of a lot of work by Mark Evens and Eric Warren (and others) at forking of GeekLog to a more robust CMS. 

glFusion - Current Software

glFusion is the most complete package that I have seen out there as FREE software.  The support is first rate and the on going development is just fantastic.  After lots of hand holding (this is where installing comes in, the auto install is not secure) and help from Mark Evens I now think that I have found my final software package for Lee's Fishing Page.  I now have the software installed as it should be for security reasons and the process of updates and upgrades is a real snap to do.  The future looks real bright with what is coming with glFusion, so I think Lee's Fishing Page is going to mature to a first rate Fishing Site.  To have a site as good as this one has now become and to only spend about $55 dollars a year for it, well that is just fantastic in my eyes.  I truly believe that other sites out there are paying way to much for what they are getting from hosts and canned software.  To me the free stuff is far superior to the canned stuff like vBulletin.  

I hope everyone enjoyed this short story of Lee's Fishing Page and its evolution.

Enjoy and thank You

Lee

by LeeGoldsmith

After my service time (4 years active) I went to collage and obtained a Masters degree in Forestry from UNH but never really worked as a forester other then to process data from other foresters using a program to calculate volume of standing timber. From there I became a self taught programmer in FORTRAN and have worked as a programmer for a manufacturing company then got into tech support now working as a test engineer for a small company that does contract work for Hewlett Packard. Lee's Fishing Page has grown from a simple site hosted by my internet provider to being hosted now by TotalChoiceHosting and being built with Geeklog and its many plugins. LFP is now on glFusion and I believe will be for the rest of time. I hope everyone likes the site and will contribute to it.