Around 1997, when I entered high school, I learned HTML (version 3!) and started LinkOPlaza, a website whose purpose was to share links to the webpages I liked. Although I found nice background pictures, and great horizontal rules designs, I never launched LinkOPlaza (if you find any reference to "LinkOPlaza" today, these are unrelated to the real LinkOPlaza, which Angelfire must have gotten rid of at some point - disk space for polychrome images is so costly!).
On my eighteenth birthday, Tiki 1.7 was released. This was the first CMS I downloaded and tried. At that time, I was working for Ido. Tiki was a great tool so I could build a website focusing on its content, rather than on its implementation. However, IdoWiki, my project to create a central website about Ido, was a lot more ambitious than LinkOPlaza. There was also a new technical difficulty - as a PHP website, I needed to find a real host. The free hosters wouldn't do, and I was on the low budget of a student working for practically minimal wages in the summer, so this was an important barrier to launch IdoWiki.
The final element against IdoWiki was… Tiki. I hadn't realized the tool I had chosen, which was not even 1 year old, was more beta than production software. I started working on improving Tiki, and I found that more rewarding than building IdoWiki. In the end, I effectively became a Tiki developer and abandoned IdoWiki. I would abandon Ido altogether soon after. This episode would concretize my taste for software development and determine my career choice. Yet… I still hadn't finished any website.
Today, I'm launching a true personal website using Tiki as www.philippecloutier.com (succeeding my minimal static personal homepage). This project was a lot more reasonable than IdoWiki - much smaller in content, and based on a tool which will soon have 10 years of maturity. Still, this site is not quite finished - a few pages are too long and probably not accessible enough. The translation to French is also just started.
The Tiki project now released version 9, highlighting its maturity by making its first serious commitment to support. Tiki 9 will be supported for 3 years, until at least November 2015.
I am proud to present my personal website using Tiki 9. This site currently presents my interests, projects, and this new blog. It simply uses blogs and wiki pages.
I must thank my long-time friend Xavier Douville for offering to host this website free of charge (on his Debian server). I must also thank all my Tiki colleagues for making Tiki 9 possible, helping me to create this website. I hit my fair share of bugs creating this site, but the good news for you is that I contributed fixes for most of these!
So, 15 years after starting LinkOPlaza, I am finally launching for the first time my own website, and after hundreds of commits to Tiki, I am becoming a real Tiki user! In fact, I am also becoming a mere Tiki user. After 3 years of freelancing, it was time to try something different. Since July, I am working fulltime as a developer for a Quebec tour operator. The Tiki experiment was worth it; I learned a lot as a freelance and it was much fun. It's sad to stop it entirely, but one has to make choices, and my new workplace has new challenges. I have had much less Tiki time for several months, and I'm only making my new status official by announcing that I'm resigning from Tiki's security team.
The golden opportunity I had would not have been possible without Tiki, the community of developers behind it, and the community of users which allows developers to work on Tiki. Thanks to my colleagues and customers for your trust.
Finally, I hope you appreciate the result of all my efforts and experiences. If not, I've enabled comments on blog posts (if this goes well, I'll do the same on wiki pages). And if you do like it, feelbe free to use it. Oh, and the same is true for Tiki 9. If you'd like to try it, it's free to try, and equally free to adopt. Enjoy!