This version of the website was released early due to changes in my schedule, along with an overwhelming number of requests that I received encouraging me to do so.
Since its original release date was planned to be sometime in the Fall of 2021 and was instead released in October of 2020, the site is very much in an un-finished and incomplete state. I therefore ask for your patience and cooperation while I gradually put the work necessary into finishing the site when time in my schedule permits.
As a note, the old version of the site was moved to https://legacy.dbmxpca.com/. Pages and tools that are not yet available on this site may be available there.
About This Website
This is the personal website belonging to yours truly— otherwise colloquially known as Christopher, Chris, or simply dbm.
Its purpose is simple— to serve as a central location for hosting a variety of things that I have worked on (such as personal projects and/or developed tools), a medium to store a number of my own memoires (perhaps including those of family members as well), and a trusted medium for enable the sharing of useful software, tools, information, and knowledge.
As I own the entirety of this domain, I can post whatever I want, wherever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I am the owner and administrator— and I control the storage and security of all the data herein. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. This site does NOT host or otherwise make available content such as malware, warez, or anything of the sort. It is simply a personal site which may host a number of content that I may deem useful to host.
The domain name, dbmxpca.com, is dedicated to the memory of my late father, who we tragically lost in 2016. The website— in whole— is dedicated to my entire family, and will (for better or worse, and to various extents) serve as a ledger of sorts, documenting different aspects of our lives.
Those wondering where the name came from: it is a truncation of the letters dbm— an alias my father used many years ago on a reputable online forum, xp— his initials, and ca— my initials. Despite wanting to include the initials for the rest of the immediate family, doing so would have resulted in a very long domain name that few would ever wish to type or be able to remember, even if they wanted to. Just imagine trying to remember something like dbmxpcepecpcap.com... On that note, for those who think dbmxpca.com is too difficult to remember, there's also my personal shortened site that will redirect you straight to various pages throughout my network, dbm.ms. Where appropriate and applicable, you will see various references to this URL around the site.
Technologies
The entirety of this website is written exclusively by myself, using the power of raw PHP and the occasional JavaScript. No frameworks have been used in the development of this website.
While no frameworks are used to power this website, some ingenious bits of code have inevitably been borrowed from sites such as Stack Overflow. Additionally, select libraries have been chosen to be used to facilitate the completion of certain tasks at a much quicker and more efficient rate. Selected libraries currently include:
defuse/php-encryption - Used in the backend of our Message Encryption and Message Decryption tools.
Securimage - Used to help automate the process of creating and managing CAPTCHAs throughout the site.
To keep this website as highly-available possible, a copy of it and its data are hosted on several virtual and physical nodes, mostly spanning the upper east coast of the United States and the southern regions of Eastern Canada. The website's version and node from which it was served from are displayed in the footer area on all pages.
This website is designed to run on a variety of web server software, and is currently powered by servers running either Apache or Internet Information Services.
Additional Credits
This version of the website (version 5.x) marks the beginning of using professionally designed HTML templates rather than designing my own from scratch, per suggestions and received feedback from many of my visitors. As such, credit for the overall theme and design goes to the Limitless responsive web application kit from Eugene Kopyov, of which I customized his templates and made my own pages from his wonderfully designed responsive web kit.
Although I am perfectly capable of designing my own HTML templates (which was the case with versions 4.x, 3.x, and 1.x of the website), enough visitors considered my designs to look more old-school and outdated, and encouraged me to use a more modern-looking design. While the website briefly used Invision Community Suite software to power the website during the first few months of 2019 (aka version 2.x), that platform proved to be unoptimized and far too taxing for the purposes of this site. I was reminded— yet again— that very often if I wanted something done right, I must do it myself: thus version 3.x was born in May of that same year.
Special thanks also goes to many of my friends and family who have made many invaluable suggestions over the course of me building my site. Some of them even have their own websites that they own and maintain:
agentpr24
agentpr24's insights and suggestions have been nothing short of invaluable. He very kindly offered many of the images and sprites used throughout this site, provided to me his own HTML templates that he spent a considerable time on and permitted me to use, and even provides one of the nodes that hosts this very site.
Gilly
Gilly's gracious help in rigorously putting my site to the test (such as troll-testing) has been absolutely indispensable. Such is also the case with his spotting and reporting bugs, giving great me suggestions and insights, nagging me to support multiple browsers and mobile devices, and more.
Legacy Website
While it is no longer officially supported, the legacy version of this website, version 4.x has been made available over at http://legacy.dbmxpca.com/ (the plain-text version) or https://legacy.dbmxpca.com/ (with SSL).