I stayed with Perl today and developed a bit more of my little data-table access program. I call it 'dbase' in tribute to the old dBase II package that ran in CP/M and later MS-DOS.

I thought a bit about web sites, and realized that there are only a few pieces and few technology sets needed. The pieces are: web server, static content (includes text, graphics, and photos), dynamic content, and database. I guess one could add things like scripts and active things for the client side, but those are the main pieces. For technology, the choices are pretty limited (but perhaps not simple): Apache or IIS for web server; HTML, GIF, PNG, and JPEG files for static content; ASP, JSP, or PHP for dynamic content scripts; and MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or other database. Client-side active things can be Javascript, Flash, or Silverlight.

While the number of pieces is small, generating content is not trivial. I played with the Quanta and Kompozer HTML editors today. Quanta is very much like Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe Homesite, and I was comfortable with it. But it has a few bugs (such as the "add an image tag" dialog collects the information but then adds no tag). Kompozer was worse -- it crashed several times. I can make it crash by running it and displaying the "File / Recent Files" list. It also crashes for other reasons.

I used GIMP to create some graphics for my phony web site. GIMP worked fairly well, and I need to learn more about its editing capabilities. I used the images it created and I have the beginnings of a web page. Now to learn how to have two sections under the navigation bar. I want one with text and another one with an image. I think this calls for frames.

Lunch was spent with former co-workers and a recruiter. It was a good lunch with some interesting discussions. I'm going to revise my resume, to indicate that I want to move out of C++ and C# development and into web development.