This web site was originally created in 1999 for our friends and relatives to see what's going on in the Selders family. It's like a virtual visit except without the noisy kids!

The web site

The site was created in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, using ASP.NET 2.0. Previous versions used Adobe / Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 and Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It's hosted on a web server in Minnesota, run by a friend.

FrontPage is definitely a mixed blessing. I got it for free, so the price was right. Version 2003 is the best upgrade since Microsoft bought the original maker of FrontPage, which had been based in Cambridge, Masschusetts. It still has some oddities and non-standard behavior, but it's very stable and eminently usable.

VS 2005 is a fabulous, developer-oriented product that's state of the art. I haven't found any bugs yet, unlike FrontPage which was littered with them, along with its non-standard keyboard shortcuts. I also like the .NET 2.0 environment, which I started learning in summer 2006.

The URL

The URL jimseld.com is derived from Jim's email alias at Microsoft. At Microsoft, people refer to each other by email alias and so for 11 years my name was jimseld.