Archill.Net

On this page I, Arjan den Boer, the webmaster of this site, will give you some background information about Archill.Net.

The beginning

Somewhere in 1997 my employer, ICT Automatisering in The Netherlands, started what we call a 'Private PC-Project'. This means that you are able to buy a PC via your employer and you pay him each month a certain amount of money for it. In fact it is being deducted from you salary. Every employee was given the opportunity to buy such a PC which also includes internet access from home and a private e-mail address. Next to that every employee was given the opportunity to start his/her own website on the companies server. In the beginning I was also considering og building a website, but I never had the time to start working on it. Only in the beginning of 2002 I've made an attempt to upload the first pages. The first pages were about our family and the page of our daughter Ciska; Ciska's Place.

An own domainname

After a while I wanted something more, my own domain. Then you start asking yourself: Who's gonna host my site? After some searches on the internet I ended up with Dutch company called 'De Heeg'. Then you also have the problem of choosing an appropriate domainname. A domainname with our names like www.denboer-oskamp.??? was quite simple. But all domainnames with www.hac.??? (Hilleke, Arjan, Ciska) were all in use with the exception of .nu. But a .nu (meaning NOW in Dutch) domain is quite expensive to register. So finally we ended up with archill, the initials of our names: ARjan, Ciska, HILLeke. It turned out that all TLDs for archill were still available, only at that time it was not allowed to register a .nl domain as a private person, although nowadays everybody is allowed to register these. So we took www.archill.net as the new domainname for our site. On the 26th of July 2002 I requested this name with De Heeg and somewhere in the afternoon of Saturday the 27th it turned out that the site could be reached by that name and I started to upload all the files to the server.

The continuation

I started to like the creation of webpages more and more so I started some pages about the vacations we've taken in the past. I started with a page about our vacation to The Gambia in 1999. As this was only a very short vacation, the travelogue wouldn't be so big to start with. During that time I also started to get interested in the web specific scripting language PHP. The first application for it were the photopages for the travelogues. After that I also made an PHP e-mail form and at the beginning of 2003 I started a new pagecounter in PHP. This new counter gives me a better insight which pages are being requested by whom and when. By now, a large part of this site is in PHP, all photo pages, all link pages and the most recent travelogues are all generated using PHP.

Links to a number of pages mentioned above within this site:

Ciska's Place
Travelogue The Gambia
Photo's The Gambia
E-mail form

What remains is wishing you a lot of fun when surfing the world wide web and especially Archill.Net.