Ziskind.com is the most ambitious web project I've worked on, and probably one of the most complex personal websites on the internet developed entirely by a single person. I've done everything from the graphic design and content authoring to implementing a wide variety of database driven applications and pages.

Ziskind.com is written in Microsoft Active Server Pages using the VBScript language. The site also uses a number of server-side ActiveX controls to increase backend functionality. The site is served off a DEC Alpha running out of IntraACTIVE, where I work.

The site uses a custom designs logging database which stores extended logging information, performs on-the-fly host and whois lookups, and generates a wide variety of data about users as they browse in real-time. The database was designed to mirror many data warehouse applications and gives me far more interesting information on user behaviors then any web-statistics package I've seen to date. (If I had found one which would do what I want, I never would have bothered writing my own).

In addition to the statistical database, the majority of the content is stored in a second database. This database contains everything from the random quotes to the content for my web portfolio, art portfolio, friends section, and all the data in the lemcon sectionss.

The most recent version of Ziskind.com was developed from a more static site in the spring of 1999. The new color scheme (formerly peach, blue and gray) was replaced with the current color scheme. The dropdown menus were reworked for Internet Explorer browsers in DHTML and CSS to function like normal menus. For Netscape users, I still wanted to simulate the menu effect so the menus have been implemented using JavaScript mouse over events.

One of the major design goals for the site was to keep the page size to a minimum, while maintaining the high level of functionality and graphical interface. To resolve this issue, Ziskind.com normally displays the top navigation bar in a separate frame and the user sees content in the second frame below it. One of the major problems with separating the navigation from the content of the page is that visitors coming to the site from search engines arrive only at the content page and never see the site's navigation. In order to solve this problem, every time a browser requests a web page on Ziskind.com, the page determines if the top navigation frame is already visible. If the navigation frame is already displayed, download time is reduced. If the navigation frame is not visible, the page is rendered with the navigation frame embedded in the document in a "non-frames" version of the page. As an added bonus, in addition to preventing users from loosing the primary navigation as they browse the site, this system also allows the site to be more quickly indexed by search engines.