Welcome to mile141.co.uk

This site has been on the net since October 1998 (about the same time bbc.co.uk was born, baa.com was a site about sheep and making the jump to Internet Explorer 4.0 was the big thing), this is the third major re-write. Edition one was written with FrontPage98, a basket case program that made far to many mistakes to be useable. A freebie copy of HomeSite proved to me how bad the code was and a total overhaul was made and a transfer from global.net to demon.net was made at that time, around 1999. The site sat there for many years quite happily and grew as I took on more hobbies.

In 2006 British Telecom decided to stop their Surftime package which gave me unlimited internet access on dial up. I enquired about broadband and must be one of the only people living inside the M25 (London orbital motorway) yet to far from the exchange to get phone line broadband. This timed in perfectly with the site out growing Demon’s limits on size and I had to look for a new home, one that didn't offer Surftime. Freenetname offered 100mb of space and a free domain name and montecarlo.demon.co.uk became mile141.co.uk with its second re-write. I stripped out all the formatting information and put it in a style sheet, tidied up a lot of loose ends and started an index for the images so I could find them when I needed. Mile141 refers to the distance of an Ironman triathlon, my new hobby so it seemed a good idea to use that. Montecarlo referred to my Mini Cooper.

After a yearly interview at work I was offered a part-job helping out with the web site and I was introduced to web 2.0 and aspx. This bought about the third re-write and the site has now made the leap to active server pages and is data driven. This gives me more options for pages and makes it easier to update as the changeable information is held within xml files or in a SQL database, all in one place. The site spawns a members area that offers a few basic features like a news RSS reader page and my holiday photo album. The members area is just me messing around with certain features. Writing this site has been made possibe with the help of learnvisualstudio.net using Visual Web Developer, the free version of Visual Studio.