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The Astronomy Net is a pet project of John Huggins in association with his web hosting company. John maintains an interest in Astronomy which began in 1973 when Comet Kohoutek made the news. He continues to pursue many avenues in Astronomy, but finds this web site his favorite effort.

All the web design and backend programming is maintained by John. This site began as a few web files and a Perl script in 1995. Growth continued with the addition of a custom AWK program to create the AstroGuide. Taking advantage of the recent advancements in web hosting technology, all Astronomy Net programs were converted to PHP and data moved to a MySQL database in 2000.

The AstroGuide
The AstroGuide continues much like it did years ago and still provides the Astronomy community with organized lists of organizations. In 1999, the AWK program was retired and replaced with a PHP program and MySQL database. This offers the Astronomy Net visitor high speeds and a better experience.

The Astronomy Net Forums
Since 1995, the Astronomy Net Forums provide the astronomy community with a public watering hole to share messages, expertise and other thoughts with each other. In 1999, the original WWWBoard Perl program written by Matt Wright, was replaced with a custom PHP program written by John. All the messages from the original WWWBoard were converted and placed into a MySQL database. The result is all the original messages are still here and still have the exact same URL as they did in 1995. The forum software is a proprietary custom PHP script. In 2001, a mailing list capability was added to the ATM forum as a testbed of new message notification. So far, nobody has signed up for email notification, but I will add this to the other forums anyway.

Articles
Also in 1999, articles were accepted from authors and placed into the web site for all to share. John hopes that more authors will come forward and offer their knowledge to the hungry viewers of Astronomy Net.

Users
In 2000, a custom written user login system was established to help prevent bogus entries into the forums and help protect the identity of the contributors to the forums. Soon, this system will expand to provide visitors with custom settings to improve their experience while they visit.

Special Thanks
I offer my sincere thanks to those who have helped my with this endevour. Michael Wyrick helped move the Astronomy Net into a database web site in 1996 with the help of his AWK scripts. Kevin Davis continues to help me move the Astronomy Net into modern times, by offering practical tips and tricks with the database design and SQL statements in the current MySQL implementation. Elwood Downey's program XEphem supplies the Astronomy Net with all epherimis data and sky graphics.

Help keep the Astronomy Net Online
In an effort to provide the best service to our visitors, we have spared no expense in providing a dedicated server and decent connectivity for the Astronomy Net web site. This web site is and will always be free to the general public. Advertising offsets some of the costs. We appreciate contributions, but we have made arrangements with some vendors who supply items of use. Click on their banners and we will get credit.

Or perhaps you would consider a donation to help defray costs.

Custom Programming Available

Through years of programming, John has aquired many web design skills with an emphasis on back-end programs and database connectivity. The Astronomy Net is the testing ground for many of his latest programs. These skills are available for your web project. Contact John if any of the following represent your requirements.

• Connect your web site to a back-end database
• You would like to have John\'s forum program installed on your VANet hosting account.
• You need John to work with your web designers to provide them with programming and database tools so they can concentrate on web design and not web programming.

Additional Information
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Unless otherwise specified, web site content Copyright 1994-2016 John Huggins All Rights Reserved "dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET" are trademarks of John Huggins