The History of Beneath the Waves

article by Ben Lincoln

This website spent a very long time in the planning stage. I started planning it back in 2006, when I needed a place to put the photos and writeup of my first long drive. After I got into multispectral photography in 2007, the need increased, because I could tell my friends and family all sorts of things about the project, but had very little to show. In August/September 2009, I took a month off of work, and one of the main ways that I spent that time was actually building this website from the concept in my mind.

From a technical perspective, Beneath the Waves is based off of the same framework as Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds, a site I've been running since 2002. That is, it's built in a batch process (using a custom .NET tool I wrote called Charon^[1]) from a collection of text files and images. This is a technique I picked up while I was working at The Peak; like common database-based "content-management systems" it divorces content from presentation, but it has the advantage of only doing the conversion once, as opposed to every time a visitor loads a page. This greatly reduces the load on the webserver, and also removes most of the potential for security vulnerabilities. Charon is written in a way that heavily favours my preferences for website design - it would be next to useless for almost anyone else, which is the main reason I haven't released it publicly.

Footnotes

1.	The name makes more sense in the context of The Lost Worlds, which is what I originally wrote Charon for - the boatman on the river Styx carrying passengers into the underworld.