Back in 1998 I looked into my Microsoft Outlook folder of emails that I had labeled "Humour." This was back when everyone was sending jokes around to everyone else, and I had something like 2,000 emails in my humor folder.

I wanted to figure out how to build database driven websites, and here I had a big-ass database. So I dumped the folder to a Microsoft Access file and built a website using PWS (that was Microsoft's "Personal Web Server" that came with Windows 98). A little asp code, a few hard coded queries, and I was on my way.

The site has been rewritten in so many languages and tools over the years I couldn't even tell you what it's been and what we've done with it. I can tell you that I've kept the same file names (joke.asp?Joke={id}) so Google keeps finding the same jokes in the same place, which might account for that five or six hundred referrals I get from Google every day.

I keep using Jokeindex as a place to test new stuff. Adding the Facebook Comment box created a new flood of traffic and returning users. Adding the ShareThis box to let people share on all sorts of other networks gets me that occasional flood of new traffic from places like Stumbleupon and Tumblr.

And now I'm using the database as a core bit of training on the Apigee API Gateway Services. Just a bunch of data that needs to be transformed from JSON to XML or translated doing service callouts in the Apigee layer. (The funniest part about translating a joke, by the way, is how not funny it is in another langauge...) Take a look at the intro video for training if you need some help getting to sleep:



So, thank you to the thousands of people who visit this site every day. I won't try to sell you anything because I've already got more than I could ask for -- a huge, diverse database to play with, a reasonable load of traffic to test, and one of the longest running social media tests on the Internet.

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