How this site came about..
I'm Mr Gargoyle, a bondage practitioner and computer programmer. In addition to tying up my partner using many forms of restraints, I enjoy bondage pictures and videos, since discovering them through Bondage Life magazine and VHS bondage tapes in the early 90's. Since the early www, I have been building a database of bondage sites.
Originally, this site was a private web application to view and update my bondage website database. It was initially written in Perl and has been converted to PHP which was then integrated into a content management system (CMS Made Simple). The site database has previously been MS Access, then PostgreSQL and is currently MySQL.
Technologies Used
This website is largely built with Open Source software (using LAMP Stack architecture):
- MySQL: the sites/categories/etc are stored in a MySQL Database
- phpMyAdmin: used to administer the MySQL databases
- PHP: All database access programming, and an admin system that is used to maintain the site database.
- NetBeans: IDE for PHP programming.
- CMS Made Simple: The content management system that provides the main layout and navigation.
- Smarty: for scripting within CMS Made Simple.
- Apache Web Server
- NotePad++: my favorite Windows text editor
- FileZilla: my favorite FTP client (works well on PCs and Macs)
- Putty
- GIMP: for banner creation
- CPanel
Some commercial products are also used:
- BBEdit: my favorite Mac editor
- MAMP: a nice test and development environment for the LAMP stack on the Mac.
- VMWare Fusion