Site Insites: Refreshing [Bits Versus Electrons]

Periodically, I need to refresh my website. Once again, I’m rebuilding the site from the ground up—or at least, taking a fresh look at the software behind the site. In my April 2016 “Bits Versus Electrons” column, I wrote about building a simple Internet of Things device and shared what I’d learned. As part of the process, I implemented a simple web server from scratch with both server- and client-side code. Without the need to produce a large-scale commercial website, I was free to take a very simple approach using Node (http://nodejs.org/). Starting from scratch can be very refreshing. It turned out that with today’s tools, it was far easier to start with a blank slate than to use heavy-duty environments. Apache and Internet information services (IIS) are valuable, but they also come with attitudes and assumptions. This refresh is my fourth iteration of my website.