Ok, it's just a simple site with my photos. Nothing exceptional, I admit.

But I chose to program it all by myself, without using any site editor, web page editor (not even HTML editors). Only text editors. Why?
First of all, because I wanted to check my skills. Everybody is able to launch a web page editor and write a site... I don't pretend to be a code guru (even if I wish I were), but I consider myself as a coder. So, this is a proof to myself that I didn't loose my grip on programming. I know there are thoundsand of freeware media galleries outside, that work fine (probably better that this site). But I like to have (and show, I confess) a completely personal page.
Moreover, I always noticed that when you click on a random page on the internet, if the page you clicked was generated by any web page editor, you download tens of kbs! If not hundreds... Just to show some TEXT. It's rather silly, in my opinion. Complicated META tags, Javascript for any task, pre-coded HTML structures, comments. If more than 24 kb are required for a page without Javascript like this one where less then 4000 caracters are shown (it could be < 5kb in linked rich text), figure out a page with some active content! Here you can be sure to get essential pages (try a "view source" here and there).

And now, let's come to the topic: how does this site work.

Basically, the main operations performed are:
- IP address tracking for each visitor
- Insertion of comments in guestbook and for each different photos, and immediate publishing.
- A spam detection system, since about 300 messages are sent each day by silly auto-posters.
- Catalogation of photos with stored comments, EXIF data, description.
- Labelling photos with different tags, to be able to query similar photos.
- Interfacing the custom query from the web page (at your right now) to the database.
- Creation of output pages with dynamical thumbnail tables.
- Enumeration of visits, logging time/date for each of them.
- A graphical frontend based on server-side scripting, minimal but (I think) functional.
- A hidden page I use to insert photos and to manage/add tags without accessing manually to the database.

Maybe in the future other options will be added, who knows.
In the beginning I used PHP and I wrote to text/binary file EVERY information (comments, EXIF, visits...), but it became too complicated as features increased (particularly for tag management). So I switched to MySQL, creating the database structure I use by now (around 10 tables). The problem is that MySQL is a service that my provider doesn't give for free... So I decided to use .mdb databases, accessed through the JET COM interface. The big problem I faced was that my provider doesn't allow to create COM objects on the server using PHP... I realized that I had to switch from PHP to ASP. So I did.

This is the story so far (like Marillion sing in Clutching at Straws album).

Update: I decided that 7 Euro/year are affordable for me, and I rented the MySQL service. Now I'm in this hybrid situation of ASP+MySQL... and I like it.