flouri.sh

http://www.energy-futures.com

This site was first built by me in 1998 as an experiment to learn ASP. I had already spent a lot of time working in QuickBasic and then Visual Basic 6. As I played with ASP, I realized that it would be easy to pick up, given what I already knew about Visual Basic.

My father was already storing his subscribers in an Microsoft Access Database, so I simply added authentication and a method for him to post content to the site.

By 2005, I had rewritten the site in ASP.NET, as a chance to play with the new controls in the .NET framework version 2.0 that I had just learned about the summer before at my internship with Microsoft. I automated everything I could, including subscribers editing their mailing and billing information and automatically accepting new web based subscribers. I finally added ip-based authentication for a government subscriber with a range of computers.

For searching, I used Microsoft Indexing Service, first with Windows NT 4, then Windows 2000, and finally Windows 2003. I found it really easy to use... an overall great solution for this problem.