History of toolstud.io

I started developing small web tools all the way back in 2004. I think the first one was a simple RGB ⇆ CMYK converter. The only scripting language I knew back then was ASP (Windows/IIS), which means that after a couple of years, I had developed a set of ASP-based tools. They followed my interests: musical, crypto, sudoku, web-development... I learned a lot about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP while developing them, the experience helped me a lot. In 2006 I decided to make them all available under one domain name. This was web.forret.com.

Then, around 2009 I started working more and more with PHP. After a while, it became hard to go back and fix ASP bugs, so I left web.forret.com as it was, on its ASP island and dove into this new PHP world. And I started developing tools in PHP, things like an RSS feed checker, a depth-of-field calculator. However, I couldn't put these tools on the same server as the older ones, because that server only did ASP, no PHP. I started by parking them under tools.forret.com, later hdslr-cinema.com with some others, and it just looked like a big mess. Different layouts, different subdomains, different logic.

In 2015 I finally decided that I should clean up and consolidate. I purchased this new domain name toolstud.io, used better PHP templating, source code version control, a more modern responsive Bootstrap layout. And I started the work of converting my ASP-based tools to PHP. It was no rocket science, and every tool in PHP works better than the old ASP one, but I just need to find the time.

In June 2016 my old hosting (the ASP one) expired, I forgot to pay in time, and I decided that I would redirect all traffic to toolstud.io, even if it didn't have all the old tools yet. It just doesn't make any sense to pay for two different hosts for a small side-project.

In 2019, I started developing in Laravel and as a result, became more critical on code style and started using more external libraries. This website hasn't been ported to Laravel yet, because I haven't found the time yet. I did upgrade to the latest version of bootstrap, fontawesome, jquery ...