My father passed away 5 years ago today.
He survived a double lung transplant, cancer(s), and a kidney transplant and throughout his life, spent plenty of time on a respirator and/or oxygen and still nearly never missed a game or match that my sister or I were competing in. He was a survivor. We used to joke that he was the 6 million dollar man (Science Fiction Notoriety) because he had probably cost the insurance company at least that.
He left a life of construction and blue collar work, went back to college and started in technology at the Area Education Agency. His path directly influenced my path in life. While I did choose the Marine Corps, I was a “Data Marine”, geek, nerd…whatever someone wanted to try and label my chosen career and personality with. 20 years later and I’ve climbed from pulling cables during a foreign war to being the head of Technology at a mid sized IT firm and now, owner of a the business under the same name that he started. His life’s passions were left to me when he passed. Building websites was one of those things.
I took over https://creston-iowa.com, which he registered in 2000 right after the peak of the .com bubble. It stayed exactly as it was for a year or so, I moved it from server to server for a while longer, then just took it offline. It needed an update and I figure I would redo it someday. Well that someday came just last weekend with the start of a new development passion. I have been wanting to do something to, not just replace the site, but to build something I’d be proud of…something he’d be proud of. That site is live now.
It moved beyond a direct replacement for https://creston-iowa.com of old, which can be found here: https://web.archive.org/…/202…/https://creston-iowa.com/ in it’s 2021 glory. The project is still in the early stages but this site is now a framework for a sum 17,000 municipalities (townships, small towns, cities, and the like) across the United States that do not have a web presence, even today, and is a full content management system for those looking to launch one.
As it stands, it has local food, news, attractions, a job board with billing functionality to sell to local businesses, a bulletin board for the town’s people to issue “complaints or accolades” and a place to post and read city council meeting minutes.
I think he would have loved the direction this has taken. Something “for the masses…”.
He has been missed…
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