mrdictionary.net is my personal soapbox where I can show all a'y'all kind folks what I've been up to with my
time. It's sort of like a blog, except not.
Hopefully, you'll be inspired by these online tales of intrigue and woe, and go out and learn all these groovy
things that're lying about on the internet and in those so-called 'books', and make your own fantastic stuff
that puts my stuff to shame.
mrdictionary.net is a really simple site, with only minor PHP swish stuff to automate the News, Article
and Random Quote system. (The 'Nectarine' layout was automated to the extreme, the database held a list of
all the sections and all the items, allowing the Site Map and the Sidebar to be updated by Magic)
The most complex part of the site by far is the menu in the top right, which is JavaScript überpowered by
PHP. PHP holds arrays of all the sections of the site, and all the items within the sections, allowing the
initial menu to built, and a copy of each sub-menu (including their JavaScript events, with hilarious
'speechmarks within speechmarks within speechmarks consequences' o.o) to be held within the large buttons
for their onMouseDown events. Using this method, the menu can easily be rebuilt, reorganized and appended
to by me with minimal fuss! \o/
Other stuff like the Wikipedia rip-off boxes (I'll admit it, they're totally ripped off. But then again
Wikipedia's there to share information, and my whole site is similar anyway. =D ) is automated by groovy
funky PHP functions.
mrdictionary.net is named after a cartoon character I created in secondary school, Mr. Dictionary, a
high-pitched, tragically unemployable, self-proclaimed 'renaissance dictionary' always trying to either get
a job, do something cool, or just 'do the right thing'. The original mrdictionary.net was primarily centered
around Flash animations starring Mr. Dictionary and his friend, a deep-voiced, all-powerful Qix named Tron.
Back then, my plan was to make fortnightly Flash animations starring the pair... but, given the
problems of me: a) being terrible at Flash and b) being terribly un-funny, I sorta gave it up.
An my new (paid) host, I set up a mrdictionary.net as a kind of showcase for my programming projects.
(Back then, it would have just been Visual Trefunge and Junk Food Man. Oh man...)
Since then, it's been redesigned a fair few times as I learn more and more about web-design technologies and
techniques. The first non-cartoon mrdictionary.net was awfully designed and was basically just rectangles of
horrible block pastel colours. After I acquired a (pretty awesome) laptop, I was able to install Apache, PHP
and mySQL on it, allowing me to easily script complicated web-apps while offline and create a more
interesting new mrdictionary.net. This next iteration's layout was heavily based around
Nectarine's layout and, looking back, was full of really poor PHP
coding and use of the database that was just plain bad.
After absolutely failing to update, or write any content for that version of mrdictionary.net for over a
year, another hosting change gave me the chance to write a completely new website from scratch. Featuring
an all-new swish layout, a nifty JavaScript menu and - get this - actual content!, the current
mrdictionary.net was launched in July 2005.
My first website was hosted at
GeoCities as
http://www.geocities.com/mattycarr_uk/, back when
it was Yahoo!'s bitch, but before they put adverts on it and got rid of FTP access. After that, a friend
offered me
space on
madhousedesign.org, where the Mr. Dictionary's Site of Meaningless Shaith lived under
http://mrdictionary.madhousedesign.org/ for about
three months before completely disappearing without a trace. (To this day, I still have no idea what
happened)
Instead of returning to GeoCities, I instead signed up, hosting and domain name, with
AvaHost.net, who were The Business™, supplying cPanel, mySQL
and a more-than-generous bandwidth and storage plan. The plan I used to go with isn't advertised anymore,
but if you E-Mail them with what you want, they'll set you up. After a year on AvaHost, I made the gross
error of attempting to use Web-Mania, being tempted by the
£20/year hosting plan. About three months into the hosting, they suffered some kind of server malfunction,
knocking the site offline for over a fortnight and then, on it's return, hurling the 'Nectarine' layout of
mrdictionary.net and a little known comic called MoDCAMeRa (which was hosted on
http://modcamera.mrdictionary.net/)
about six months into the past with their patented Lack Of A Backup service. Luckily, all data was backed
up on my laptop two days before.
Attempts at cancellation
totally failed, and they refused to accept any responsibility. Instead of repairing the site, I instead
looked around for another host, planning to return to AvaHost if I couldn't find anything. Through my
Uplink connections, I learned of 'EcwHost', a hosting service run by a cool guy named Nick.
EcwHost offered one redeeming feature over all the other hosts I found: EcwHost was
completely and unequivocably free, providing one signed up during a two-hour-per-week window on Thursday
evening. Tom and I signed up MoDCAMeRa and mrdictionary.net there as soon as we were able, which is where
they currently reside.
Unfortunately, EcwHost don't offer über-free anymore, only plain über, so if
you're looking for a competitively priced, beyond-generous webhost with the best support anybody
could possibly ask for, give Ecw a shot. Right now.</advert>
Ecwhost eventually shut down their free service entirely, so I had to move. It's now hosted at
DreamHost, under some unbelievably generous hosting plan.
mrdictionary.net is a .net because mrdictionary.com was taken by some dork ages ago. Now it's owned by
Dotway who, their advertising would have you believe, want to sell me mrdictionary.com for gawd knows how
high much. For some stupid reason, their sales software doesn't seem to cope with people actually being
interested in their placeholders advert domains, so mrdictionary.com is jammed for the time being.
Besides 'mrdictionary dot net' sounds so much better! ^_^
