Welcome To Beveropolis.com Home
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Hello, and welcome to the Beveropolis web site. You may be asking, "what is the Beveropolis?". In short it is my house. As for where the name came from, that's a bit of a long story.

My original intent when making this site was to collesce the vapor of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension (yes, I am a bullshit artist). These days it is more of a place to document life as it happens to me. You may find it interesting; you may find it dull, and I'm sure that I will offend many of you as I have a rather skewed outlook on the universe; such is life. If you have any complaints about the site, put up your own. Because, frankly, I don't give a shit. If you wish to drop a note I can be reached here.

Below are links to things available on the web site. Some things are more complete than others as priorities change so fast in life, especially when your life is rocked with divorce, remarriage, pregnancy (well, my wife's pregnancy anyway) and all of those little potholes you hit on the long road of life.
 The wedding site (not so complete)
 The baby site (getting there)
 The photo ablums
 The journal (complete)
 My travel log
 My voice-over page
 Site Technical Information
 Site History

I must spew a paragraph about technical BS. This site is best viewed with Microshaft's Internet Exploder v4.0+ (click here to get it). This isn't just a sales pitch, it's really true. For those Netscrape users out there the site will work on Netscape 4.x+, but, dude, get a real browser; Netscape sucks. Take it from an experienced web developer, Netscape blows (hmm, she's gone from suck to blow). AOL users, get a life.

The Story of "Beveropolis"
Once upon a time I met a man named Ted. We met, actually, when my ex hooked him (at the time her boss) up with one of her best friends. That relationship broke down, however his and my friendship has remained strong for, um, geez, about eleven years now. Anyway, Ted holds (or held, children kinda put a damper on things like this) a biannual event known as the Beer Test. At this event a bunch of us sit around and swill small quantities of a large selection of beers in a blind taste test. It was at one of these events that Ted discovered that I have the ability to consume large numbers of beers (aka Beverages (see where this is going?)), a skill I learned in college. As the result of this I was dubbed The Beverage King. To make a long story short(er), this name morphed into Beverage King, Beverage Excellent King, Bev E. King, Bevvy King, Bevvy, and finally Beveropolis. The nickname, in one form or another, was applied to just about everything related to my life. My car is the Bevvymobile, my TV is the Bevvytron 4000, and of course, my house is The Beveropolis. This name is enblazened on a sign hanging on the wall of the sun room of the latest edition of The Beveropolis.

The History of Beveropolis.com
This site started out when my brother bought the name Beveropolis.com for me as a birthday present back in, oh, geez, '95 I think. I immediately had to plant some sort of flag on it. Initially it was all static HTML with one image. It looked like hell, but I really had no direction in which to go. It wasn't until my trip to Egypt that I received the requisite inspiration. While on the bus from Cairo to Alexandria and back, on my good old Dell Inspiron notebook, I wrote the first rendition of the site. It took the form of an interface through which I could make journal entries and store them in a database. As time went on I added the photoalbum functionality, travel database, sub sites, and so forth. I revamped the look with much more sophisticated imagery, but kept the "book" look and feel, as I learned the ins and outs of image editing software.

The Technology Behind Beveropolis.com
The site is largely database driven. All of the journal entries, photo albums (with their associated images), and travel logs are stored in databases. The journal rendering engine supports embedding of links to images in the photo albums. The links can be made via IDs or keywords. Links can also be made to trips from journal entries (and vice versa). There is more static HTML than I would like. My plan is to move the subsite definitions into a database. They are mostly the same with variations on which modules (journal, photo album, trip, etc.) are included and which database IDs they carry. This screams automation. With a little URL analysis I should be able to use a single page to make it look like there is a real hierarchy. With the baby on the way I don't know when I will get the chance to do this, but it beckons me. I would also like to improve my use of style sheets. It's not very tight and my OC nature makes that drive me nuts.

Since that writing (about five years ago) I have found time to actually build the next generation of the beveropolis architecture. I have yet to implement it here, largely because using SQL Server for this is pretty much over kill and not really worth the extra $120 a year. However you can see it in full-blown, large scale glory at The Daily Discord. The Discord went live over a year ago (9/4/2008) and the architecture has been rock solid.

Well, that's about it for the home page. I guess it can't go on forever. Why don't you check out the rest of the site?