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The IceCold Evolution

On the first day of the new millennium we decided that the time was right to establish our presence on the World Wide Web. We had planned to register our-surname.co.uk as our new web address, but we were beaten to it by four days! After a couple of days of careful deliberation a consensus was reached, and IceColdinAlex.co.uk was born.

We quickly recovered from the disappointment of missing out on our first choice, and soon began to enjoy the anonymity of sheltering behind our eccentric domain name. That said, it's still a pain spelling out an 'Ice Cold in Alex' email address to people who haven't heard of the film!

The website is our online photo album, allowing us to share our photos with family and friends. Most people do the same on Facebook or Instagram these days, but I'd like to think that IceColdinAlex.co.uk will outlast them both.

Here's a short history of the website's evolution. The entires correspond to the screenshots.

03/01/2000: A site is born (v1)

As the Year 2000 arrived, we registered IceColdinAlex.co.uk. Over the next couple of months, I began to build the site in HTML, using frames to navigate between the pages. It looked pretty awful! Thankfully, there is little record of this early masterpiece - only the original logo remains!

02/07/2000: I can see clearly now the frames have gone (v1.01)

Within a few months, the frames made way for a nifty JavaScript menu - well frames were so yesterday! Later in the year, I added a Guestbook. One of the early visitors described the look of the site as "very IKEA"!

01/10/2001: The Dynamic Duo (v2)

After four months of development, the 'all new' IceColdinAlex.co.uk site was launched in 2001. The IKEA effect made way for something slightly more frosty, but the real difference was under the surface. I rewrote the site using PHP to build pages dynamically. Page descriptions, photo captions, and so on, were all held in a MySQL relational database. Very professional!

08/12/2006: The slideshow must go on (v3)

Five years after the last radical rewrite, it was time for another. A lot of the updates were to make the site easier to maintain, but there was also a significant change to the way our photos were displayed. Rather than scolling down a lengthy page to see all of the photos, the new version presented them in a simple button-operated slideshow for the first time.

12/05/2008: Putting IceColdinAlex on the map (v3.02)

Or more precicely, putting the map on IceColdinAlex. This was a real labour of love! I integrated Google Maps into the site, to show all of the places we'd visited on an embedded map. Not only did this challenge my creaking programming skills, but I also had to find the latitude and longitude for over 160 locations.

The following month, I added some neat search functionality into v3.03, using Sphider, an open-source search engine for PHP and MySQL.

03/04/2011: Put it on the tab (v3.05)

My next big change was another 'look and feel' improvement. A lot more Javascript but, I'd like to think, a tidy tabbed approach to help navigate through the site.

09/06/2012: Playing to the gallery (v3.06)

In 2012, I revamped the photo pages again, this time to make use of GalleryView, a jQuery photo gallery plugin - some pretty nifty open-soure slideshow functionality that looked way better than my own clunky implementation.

10/05/2016: A change of heart (v3.07)

For 16 years IceColdinAlex.co.uk had been hosted by the same ISP, POBox Internet. Alas, they went out of business at the end of 2015, so we had to move on. We're now hosted by Falcoda Internet. Not unexpectedly, the move 'broke' the website - it had been running on 10 year-old versions of PHP and MySQL. Part way through the rewrite, Google stopped supporting their old version of the GoogleMaps API, so my mapping functionality had to be re-worked too. It all took quite a while and I never did get the search functionality working again. :-(

At around the same time, Laura's nephew, Thomas had recreated the iconic bar scene from "Ice Cold in Alex" for us. Inspired by his artwork, I gave IceColdinAlex.co.uk a complimentary look for its relaunch.

??/??/????: Off the shelf (v4)

Although I'd enjoyed building and enhancing our website over the years, it was clear that I was well behind the curve when it came to browser and device compatibility - viewing our photos on a smartphone was a very poor user experience. I decided to switch to an off the shelf package, and after a brief period of evaluation, I selected jAlbum.

The migration took me a lot longer than I'd hoped, and although I miss some of the features of my old hand-crafted site, I have to say I'm happy with the results. :-)