Last week, after the May Day holiday, I went to visit a school that I did a web site for. It was a long standing invite and it seemed like a good time to pay them a visit.
The site was done over 2 years ago, using simple Apache SSI, a few lines of PHP, and that was pretty much it. In many respects it was a joy to do, they had all their text as plain ASCII, all their pictures chosen, and had an idea what they wanted - without wishing to micro-manage the XHTML. In the past two years they haven't nagged or bothered me at all, and they are very happy with the site. This weekend I've done some very minor updates for them and added a new page.
At work, I've spent the two intervening years working on a site for work, built on trendy XML, and using lots of Perl. At a technical level it's been great fun to do, I've learnt an awful lot, and there are many parts of the process that I'm very happy with. However unlike the school, getting content from work has been like getting blood from a stone, and without my boss single handedly writing most of it, it would still only be a prototype.
