Standing at the crossroads. The website software has evolved a bit more. Photo albums are necessary so that I can pull in what remains of macgirvin.com - which does little more these days than house my photo collection and collect my email archives.

Soon I'll be shutting down the aging Linux box in my garage and moving everything that's left onto hosted websites such as the one you are getting this post from.  

The photo archives use group permissions. This way if a new family member of friend registers I only have to add them to one list to let them see the entire private photo collection. It is also a departure from the simple permissions I originally baked into the site - registered or not, admin or not.

It provides full control of who can access what. The basic permissions structure was fine for getting something working quickly. Now it's time to move on. You want something only accessible to family? To males over 35 that are into scuba diving? You need a little better permission control. 

This in turn opens the possibility of group permissions for forums, weblogs, or just about anything else. That's what I mean about standing at the crossroads.

This is where everything changes.   

I've been asked why I do this. Why do I spend so much time on my computer? What do you have to show for it? What purpose does it serve? If you aren't making money, why are you doing it?

I suppose to a casual observer it looks as though my efforts have been about as productive as if I spent my days playing Duke Nukum or hack all day. Why bother, indeed? What have I done?

I built a community web portal. If you think it's so easy, try it yourself. There are a lot of smart people on this planet, and a lot of community web portals - and most of them are free. So what is it that drives me? First of all, I don't know of anybody that has tried to single-handedly write a community portal from scratch. This is almost always done by organizations (both formal and informal). It is a huge undertaking full of thousands of challenges. I'm not a worker bee solving one little piece of the puzzle. Instead it encompasses a much bigger picture. 

That's why. 

This is my education. You can't buy this education. You can only live it. Why would somebody choose mysqli over the mysql interface? Why not use HTTP auth for a website? Isn't it easier? Can you make drop shadow images in a cross-platform manner? How about if you change the page layout? How do you upload entire directories to a photo album? Is it even possible? How do you make clean URLs? Plugins? Virtual hosts? Themes and avatar pages? How about ajax chat? How hard is it really? What else is AJAX useful for? Should you use a procedural or object oriented approach for a large website project? Why? How do you manage sessions? What problems are you likely to have if you build a PHP5 application and try and run it on PHP4? Why on earth would somebody use PHP if Ruby is so much faster to develop? Why on earth would somebody use PHP when the execution time of 'C' and 'C++' are so much faster? Which costs more to maintain, MVC programming or mixed-script? Should forums be flat or threaded? Why? What is the most efficient schema in all of these cases? Do you use existing code or write it yourself? Which is really the quickest to market? 

Anybody can download a web portal and create a website. I can answer all of these questions and hundreds more from first hand experience. I've done it. I know why. 

And that's why...