All About ThePCSpy.com
What's the point of ThePCSpy?
Debatably, none. TPCS has been my — this is Oli by the way, nice to meet you — excuse for learning to program and do webdesign. It's been my sandbox for trying out new things and in doing so has directly taught me ASP, ASP.NET, SQL, [x]HTML/CSS and a smidgen of PHP for off-server tools of old. The server that it was hosted on was also used to host a few friends sites.
As the site matures and the framework I've built myself becomes more powerful, I'm spending more time putting time and effort into research and writing content. I've been writing about programming since it started and more recently I've been doing research into security and other analytical projects to show people why things happen.
From the beginning of time to now...
As all things do, with an idea. The premise was always to provide article-based content. The focus originally was, however, not good-minded programming, undeleting of things and well conducted research. The site was originally called Hacking-Guide.com. There. You know my secret. That started up at the end of 1998 and was written in ASP. You would be surprised just how many visitors you get with a domain like that. There are obviously too many teenagers on the internet... I was one.
In at the end of 2000 when my "free" domain expired, I decided to legitimise things. I purged the "how to hack windows 98" tutorials from the database — yes its always been running off a DB (not bad for a 15 year old?!) — and started (with help from friends I made on H-G) to write slightly fresher content but much of it was still security based.
Time kept rolling on and I kept adding small features and tools (a random-joke generator, a PostCode-to-Map generator (before Google Maps or anything like that), a few IP-lookup tools) while continuing to add tutorials on things I was learning.
One key factor of this was I got to do a lot of redesigning and rehashing of the backend code. ASP is not great for doing redesigns without changing code, so that's just the way it was. Since I began H-G there have been 10 designs for this site.
In June 2005 I decided to take the massive step of moving all my crappy ASP code over to something organised. I'd was spending that summer working for a company making software for internal MS usage which involved a fair amount of ASPNET. Not so much the traditional .aspx page-based ASPNET either. It was beautiful server controls where everything is compiled and added programmatically. While I was working for them I was planning out my object structures; emulating controls in my head and covering all the basic functionality and the data-design that would be needed to support it.
Six months passed and I was still churning out pages of planning but no code. My host at the time decided to implode financially and I was forced to look elsewhere. I was in a thread for the best ASPNET host at the time on Experts-Exchange and someone mentioned Hostek. Once I got my data over there I decided it was time to start heavily developing and within a week (due to my heavy planning and rapidly moving fingers) I had the skeleton of the site up and ready.
Things still aren't finished. There is still basic functionality missing which I'm working to fix as fast as I can... But that's the way things work here. Its constantly evolving and I'm always working on it.
From now to infinity...
More (including a slightly more thorough history).
