technology
If you like to know how things tick

Tim Berners Lee could never had imagined that the hypertext language he created at CERN would explode into the world wide web as we know today. Hyper text Markup Language or HTML has been through numerous revisions to date, and there is plenty more in the pipeline.
But it hasn't always been smooth sailing. Browsers from different companies have not always implemented the standards correctly, and in some cases have added their own specific tags to extend their market share. Thankfully today, if you are using a modern browser most things on a webpage should display roughly as the designer intended.

Whats under the hood?
Simple PHP and MySQL, both proven technologies that are almost open source and more importantly free, as in beer! I originally started out designing websites using Active Server Pages (ASP) from the big M. In fact two of my clients are still running these sites, almost 7 years after they were first built.
When Microsoft started pushing .NET as the be-all and end-all of website development I saw the way the wind was blowing and jumped ship. Many websites today use what is called a LAMP stack, (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). In fact Apache, MySQL and PHP are now mature technologies and can be used on Unix, BSD and even their arch rivals Windows servers.

PHP, sounds a bit odd doesn't it?
Not really, Pre Hyper-text Processor is a special markup language that allows me to do lots of funky things to a standard html page before it's beamed directly to your browser. In fact there isn't much that can't be done, and chances are if you need something special, it's been done before and is to be found on the internet. While there are lots of new web technologies like Ruby on Rails appearing, PHP continues to truck along and implement new features every six months.

So what's the deal with MySQL then?
Swedish actually, but much better than meatballs. Structured Query Language (SQL) is a language that allows you to lay out the blueprint of a database and how all the tables interact together. I started using it at university back in 1990, and you know what? I'm still using it today unlike those useful courses I did in cobol and fortran.
Virtually all major database systems can read and write in SQL, and MySQL is no different. It's a free system to download, install and use. And it's maturing very rapidly.
And while MySQL is probably not suitable for running the tax department for a medium sized country, it is perfect for running websites of virtually any size and scale.

How does my website benefit?
When I first started out designing websites hosting for ASP was far more expensive than LAMP. Thankfully the costs have now come down.
What you do get though is my experience in crafting websites from PHP and MySQL, and the knowledge that rather than resting on it's laurels monstaCMS is evolving alongside the core foundation of technology.