Asinen likes A List Apart

A List Apart

About this site

The Asinen site came into existence back in 2002 (at asinen.com) and was envisaged as a shop front to Simon Jessop's part time software development business - little Java web applications at that time. But life is a funny old thing and there never quite seemed the time to develop the site beyond private pages used for testing and discussing the solutions he was producing.

Screenshots of the three versions of asinen.org

In early 2004, Simon took up full time employment and asinen.com as a business shop front became surplus to requirements (before it had ever really grown into the role). Over the preceding year Simon had become interested in free software and particularly the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and signed up for the domain asinen.org with ICDSoft to experiment with this. He also hoped to make some kind of contribution to the community that had given him what was now his full-time computer system, GNU/Linux.

Since 2004, Stuart Jarvis has also contributed to asinen.org to a greater or lesser extent, including designing much of the first site that went live in mid 2004. Simon redesigned the site as an exercise in web design and coding in early 2005 and began to find that the increased content was driving more traffic to the site. However, the 2005 design, while visually appealing, did not accommodate a sane grouping of sections the content with the result that almost everything was filed under the blog section.

Realising a further re-design was necessary in early 2006, Simon worked with Stuart again to develop the new design. Work began on the new design, which began with Simon's initial concept and was fine tuned by Stuart in May. Finally, in July 2006, the design was ready to go live and it became possible to add new content again, something that had mostly been on hold since the beginning of the new design process early in 2006