Hans van der Kamp

Some time ago I received a request to build a website that was quite complex. It took me about a month to build it and that includes working through the evenings and weekends. Once in a while I really enjoy that. Most of my sites - with a few exceptions like hansvanderkamp.com, theinsanerobot.com and ameanet.org (main entrance) - are built following a simular structure.

The design and the basic coding are done in Photoshop and Notepad. For all functionality that demands interactivity and database connectivity I use ready made applications that I redesign and adjust where necessary. Picking the right software done by the right coder is a tedious task but a bare necessity with security in mind.

While working on the client’s site I forgot about AMEA a bit for a while, so once the job was done, the list of things to do for AmeaNet had become endless. I started receiving e-mails of members of the Movies section that it was about time for some new movies and the Picture of the Day once again ressembled National Geographic’s TV concept; rerunning reruns.

Usually I do what seems urgent first. It is like redecorating your own house. Once the last room is finished, the first one is up again for a fresh coat of paint. The Vintage Photographs section always ends at the bottom of the list and I never seem to find the time to work on it. Why? Because there are never any real problems. The members are happy. There are no conflicts between members and moderators. In fact it is the most successful AmeaNet website.

Still, it was about time that the site had a thorough upgrade. With over 15.000 pictures and 947 members it was an inch away from collapsing. We already had to manually activate accounts after payment because the databases were not in synch anymore and there were some warnings that predicted a possible sudden collapse.

So, I am currently working as hard as I can on a completely new, upgraded Vintage Photographs Section with a lot of extra functionality such as video uploading and downloading. The site runs on an American program for photo posting with a Russian payment front end. Both programs have to correspond through one database. Both programs are easy to install. Integrating them however is a real pain in the neck. The Russian coders are real wizards, they work miracles, but if you ask them a question the confusion starts. They had me busy for half a day looking for a line of code that had to be ‘the line above 'cancel_return' => "$config[root_url] /cancel.php?payment_id=$invoice”‘. So I was looking at the line directly above it and did not find what I was looking for, until it hit me; they meant ‘the line on top of the file’ — positioned 97 lines up.

But it is getting there. If you have an active account you can test it at:
http://vintage.ameanet.com
There is still a lot to be done and I am not sure about the design, but it is working..

The universities of Utah, Pittsburgh and Cornell (New York) have received a 2,4 million dollar grant to scan foreign media for content that is not favorible of the USSR.. uh, sorry I meant the United States of America.

Isn’t it sweet?

I mean, the world outside of the US is a huge terroritory and scanning all those media for anti-US sentiments must be one hell of a job. 2,4 million seems underpaid to me.

To be honost I was amazed to see that all these universities are still there. Just by listening to American representatives, I had assumed that The Empire of Fear had given up on education two or three decades ago.