From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] About me
My name is Monty Barker. I am 19 years old. I was born on September 22, 1988 in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I currently live just outside of Wilmington.
[edit] Interests
Computers, Television, Music, Cartography
[edit] Computers
I consider myself very proficient in computer technology. I built my own computer on October 7, 2005. I bought Windows Vista the day it was released, and before that I used Windows XP. I can program in several languages, including, but not limited to, HTML, JavaScript, C++, C, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Bash.
[edit] Website and forum, 2001-2007
Monty Barker's Website was launched on April 20, 2001, under the name Barker's Web Site, as a very small personal website. It had 2 pages; a home page, and a page talking about the options for customizing the Microsoft Windows start menu. Version 2 of the site was released on December 20, 2001, even though it was almost identical to version 1. The site was renamed to Monty Barker's Web Site shortly after. The site started to grow, getting more content and pages, most of which were computer oriented, with version 3 being released on April 20, 2002, and version 4 being released on November 30, 2002. On March 28, 2003, version 5 was released, which added a site-wide side navigation system (previously site navigation was done with links at the top and bottom of each page). Version 5 was the first version to be entirely hand-coded, instead of being coded with a WYSIWYG editor as before.
On January 15, 2004 (which was, coincidentally, the thousandth day of the site's existence), version 6 of the site was released. "V6", as it was called, was a complete rewrite, adding many new features, including a color scheme changer and experimental login system. The login system was soon removed, but the color changer stayed. However, V6 had a lot of bugs and was not organized very well. That was fixed when version 7 ("V7") was released on April 20, 2005, the 4th anniversary of the original launch of the site. V7 was another complete rewrite, with a cleaner, more organized layout, and many bugfixes and enhancements. With V7, the site's name was slightly changed to Monty Barker's Website, making website one word. V7 was proposed to feature content in Spanish as well as English. However, even though some Spanish content was written, and the site images were made in both languages, the Spanish version was never released.
In late 2003, as a joke, I created a web page for my cat. Interestingly, that page quickly became the most popular page on the site by far. The page features pictures, a mini-biography, a guestbook, and a humorous fictional agenda for any day in his life.
On October 5, 2003, a companion forum to the website was launched. It is hosted by Proboards, a popular free remotely hosted message board service. Monty Barker's Forum is mostly computer support oriented. Version 2 of the forum was released on March 1, 2004, and version 3 was released on October 5, 2004, the one year anniversary of the forum's launch. Versions 2 and 3 both added several features (version 3 added a color scheme changer similar to the one on the website). On May 15, 2005, version 4 was launched, which for the most part was to correlate with the release of version 4 of the Proboards software.
On January 27, 2007, I decided that the website and forum would close on February 20, 2007, primarily due to rapidly declining page visits over the past couple of years. On February 20, I closed the forum as planned, but I decided to leave the website open, and it will stay open for the time being. Most of the content from the site and forum will be preserved and possibly put on a new web site at some point.
