Foreword

First, I would like to confer my apology to previous users of myHq. This update has been a long time coming and should have been completed years ago. In addition, while it is a decent implementation, it is sub-par to what can be done. It can be better and in time, it will be.

That said, a not-so-perfect system that works now is better than the perfect one that is never lauched. And, I now realize that time in college and time now is a vastly different proposition. So you now have the new myHq.

While I had some help for the colors/icons, this is basically my 'little' project. Actual work time for this base version of the new myHq was only about 2 odd man(person)-months.. and if I were in college, it would have been completed in 3 months. Since I'm not, it took closer to 10 months. As I said, college-time and now-time is different. There is more to life.

Enjoy the site. There is a whole load of features that is to come and with enough time, you'ld see it soon :>

History

The original myHq was thought out to be an online bookmark management system in my freshman year at college. It was to be a nice simple online application allowing you to upload/download/add/edit/share/delete your bookmarks.

It was pretty obvious even at that time (1995) that something like this was required. I had just started @ UPenn 'not Penn State' ( haha ) and used multiple computers throughout the day. I even did a static site at that time. Still, time came.. and went.. and it wasn't until late 98 that the first version of myHq was completed. That took maybe 2-3 weeks. Yup, it didn't take that long.. but realize that even then, I already had 10 odd years or so where I've been around computers futzing around and creating little daft programs.

After graduating in '99, myHq was sad to say, somewhat neglected. I took up a job as a consultant @ Scient (now defunct) and worked on carstation.com (also disappeared.. well, subsumed I think) & hotwire.com ( still around.. hooray! ) - a great experience all in all. Left in '00, did some more stuff (and updates here and there for myHq) and now it is fall 2006. myHq is now about 8 years old.

Features

Please check out the front page

Technology Geeks

This is for the geeks out there.. like myself.. For those that realize it, yes.. it is overkill and I probably spent 10x of my time on the base code rather than on the app code... but still, the scalability & the ease in extending the site is worth the amount of complexity.


(Aug 07) That said, I'm thinking about database abstration and even in some cases removal. Scaling w/ a distributed architecture eventually bogs down at the database (even with the partitioning being done here) and it would be sweet to be able to add addressable data storage capacity just by adding another machine without the complexity of a clustered/replicated database.
Why Perl? Why not PHP? (or Java or .Net or...)
I'm a self-taught perl coder. At the time I started coding myHq, PHP was not sufficiently mature. Now it is. But I'm far enough along to know that it is not the ahem.. tool.. that matters, it is how you use it.

Will this scale?
Yes. It'll easily handle a few million users, though when it goes above 10M or so there are some inherent but solvable bottlenecks (mostly search related on a sitewide basis). Nevertheless, for normal scaling, it is as easy as adding a machine and changing a few parameters.

Future