About Me » About This Website

Current Site Design:

My website is completely contained within the WordPress Content Management System using a modified/customized version of the Aeros theme (it previously used the Andreas09 theme). Multiple plugins are being used to further customize and enhance the content of the site.

The site is hosted on a virtual server on DreamHost; I switched from 8-95.com/AlphaHosting because of continuous reliability (site uptime) issues.

Website History:

My website was originally created as hand-coded HTML on 21-April-1996 when I was a student at the University of Louisville Speed School of Engineering. After graduation , the website was hosted on my Sprynet user account, which became an Earthlink user account.

In 1998, I registered my own domain name after reading a story about someone who registered a domain in the name of Marc Andresson to get his attention for venture capital funding. I decided I didn’t want anyone else to register my domain name, so I went to register.com and signed-up.
After registering my own domain name, I started hosting the site on superuser.net in 1998. I switched hosting providers to dixiesys.com / 8-95.com in 2001 after reading a thread on the AnandTech.com Hot Deals Forum.

About a year later, I switched my page design to use CSS across the entire site and started using Microsoft FrontPage to handle/automate the navigation menus and to provide quick HTML editing.

In February 2005 I experimented with PHP and mySQL for the first time and eventually installed WordPress and used it to maintain my blog. In November 2006, I moved my entire site over to WordPress.

Internet Archives

The internet archive, located at arcive.org, contains historical content of many web pages, including carltonbale.com.  To view old versions of this webpage, please visit the carltonbale.com archive page located at archive.org

Old Web Page Designs

Used to keep old design versions posted online, but I decided to remove them due to containing old/insecure code and a lack of relevance of the content.  The versions were from the times when I first created them on servers at the University of Louisville back to just a few years ago. Descriptions are below.

Old Version #1 Animated Java applet displaying my name (nothing like a slow-loading Java applet on every page!) and a huge roll-over navigation bar (wow that requires a lot of space.)

Less Old Version #2:  Just to see if I could, I used the first animated picture and sound file I could find. The result: an animated Beavis picture saying “I am Cornholio!” Ah, Internet Humor circa 1996.

Less Old Version #3: This was the first time I put some effort into the design of my site. I converted it over from flat HTML with no automated navigation menus to a (mostly) tableless CSS design with FrontPage navigation thrown in (because I didn’t know any better way to automate site-wide navigation).