Destiny.be

Destiny.be (“Find your destiny”) was a community site I wrote entirely myself in 2002, during my first year of applied informatics, partly to experiment with databases and partly because I was fed up with community sites such as asl.to (later Netlog) making their members pay. Members got a profile with their own guestbook, could chat, send each other private messages and talk on the forum, and found each other through the member list and search. It grew to several hundred members, mostly students, and stayed free of advertising.

Built from scratch. Everything was PHP and MySQL, written as a set of functions. I designed the layout in Photoshop and built it in HTML and CSS, with one base stylesheet and a separate stylesheet per colour, so members could pick the colour scheme they liked. Language files served the whole site in Dutch and English without keeping two sites, cookies kept members logged in, and an XML feed let other sites show Destiny.be’s news. The site maintained itself: pages always showed the latest data, so my work went into new features rather than into keeping existing ones running.

In Clickx Magazine. Clickx, the Belgian computer magazine, featured Destiny.be twice. In a test of dating and community sites it called it “a very likeable small-scale project with some three hundred members, mostly students, made by a Bruges student”, and a later piece described it as an ad-free community with very young members, founded by a West Flemish informatics student who wanted to experiment with databases, where nobody needed to be a computer geek and the forum was busy with ideas for new websites and projects. By then it counted 541 registered members.

Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, XML, Photoshop.

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