Site Background

by Jin-Wei Tioh

BlueSmoke actually came to life sometime back in April 2000, but was only formally launched on 31st August 2000. However, it was not pretty, similar to a real life Frankenstein. It was still in a semi-design stage, with quite a fair bit of redundant and erroneous HTML code. Work on the BlueSmoke Forums began early in May 2000, employing an extremely modified version of BoardMaster. As this was my maiden experience programming in the Perl language, it naturally took quite some time for it to be completed. The completed product looked good and worked reasonably well, but since it was so heavily modified (whole sections were reworked), there were bound to be small problems here and there. Moreover, BlueSmoke was still based on a non-database design. This didn't really complicate the posting of new content, but definitely got in the way when any changes to the site design were made.

Thus, the decision was made that some form of database system was needed. This was when my experienced gained in creating the Forums came in handy. The result? The CGI scripts that currently drive the site, eg. viewArticle.cgi and viewGallery.cgi. The overall control of the site has become more centralized, making site updates, news posting, etc. an order of a magnitude faster. The Sitenews, Web News and Case Gallery sections were added and modernized around December 2000 to January 2001, with most features being overhauled to PHP in October 2001.

That's the technical background of the site anyway. Why the name? Frankly, I don't know, but since the original design of the site was blue-ish in overall appearance, BlueSmoke would be kind of a cool name, especially seeing how it relates to electronics 🤖. Other aspects? BlueSmoke started out as a joint effort between myself and Jin-Ning, with him handling games and I everything else. This worked initially, but doing everything was getting somewhat out of hand. We have yet to bring in a News Editor, so if you'd like to come aboard drop us a line! That's about the gist of it so far...

Grease Monkeys