Hüpattl! SoftwareMuseum: Era 2 — neveprise.net
When I opened the Museum, I promised more eras. Here is the second one: neveprise.net, which I ran from 2001 to 2002.
What it was
After Neveprise Inc. the website moved to Linux: Debian, Apache and a lot of XML. neveprise.net called itself a “light beta release” and never got any further. It was less about my own software and more about articles: an introduction to XML and XSL, programming basics, TCP/IP and the OSI layers, short reviews of free software like Glimmer, XMMS, OggEnc and cdparanoia, and notes on BeOS and every Windows from 3.11 to 2000.
Every article was an XML file. XSL stylesheets, run by the Sablotron processor on Debian, turned them into the pages, and each article could also be downloaded as PostScript, PDF or plain text. Perl scripts on the server did the search and let visitors rate the articles. The splash page proudly lists the tools: Apache, Debian, Mozilla, the GIMP, PNG instead of GIF.
The rebuild
As with Era 1, I rewrote the pages in current HTML and CSS and kept the look: the deep blue, the rainbow lines above each box, the water-drop header. The articles and their PostScript, PDF and text versions are all there, and so are the screenshots of BeOS and old Windows desktops.
A few things are gone. The search box and the rating forms are still on the pages, but they do nothing: there are no scripts on the server any more. The links to plain HTML print versions are removed, because only the old unconverted copies of them survived. And the Diseased.Engine download is missing one source file whose author I no longer know, so I don't hand it out.
Every museum page now has a red bar at the top with links back here, to the imprint and to the privacy notice.