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About this site

This is being run from my home. I wanted the challenge of not only creating a database driven site from scratch, but also putting in place the infrastructure to run it.

To this end I bought a couple of second hand PC's - one to host my database and run to act as the webserver. I spent a little more and got Windows Server 2022 to run the webserver on.

The database is SQL Server express edition, which is free for non-commercial purposes (and I'm not intending in monetising this site). This does have virtually the full functionality of the commercial version and is more than adequate for a personal site.

The site itself uses MVC (Models, Views, Controllers) and is written using Visual Studio (again, there is a free version for non commercial use).

The rest is entirely me. I have written the code, done the design etc. Of course I couldn't manage without the resources available on the web - Microsoft has provided tutorials which got me started with MVC itself (I am already familiar with programming in C#, SQL, Javascript/JQuery, HTML and CSS).

StackOverflow is also a valuable resource and my thanks goes out to the many contributors - both those who ask the questions and those that answer them.

W3Schools is another valuable resource which I have put to good use.

Of course, the site would be nothing without any content. As I fill it I will expand on this to provide the necessary acknowledgements.