The design of this website dates from 2017/18. I developed it to replace the previous system, which was a hodge-podge of data mixed up with page design, which was difficult to update. My intention was to separate the data from the page design.

In order to do this, a backend database was required, and the one available from the ISP was MySQL (it later changed to MariaDB). The web front end relied on two Perl modules, DBI.pm for database interactions and CGI.pm to generate the HTML. I was already familar with both of these. Although CGI.pm was already deprecated in 2018, it provided a quick way of getting a new website in place.

The new database went into production use in December 2018, and was still working well seven years later, as long as it was viewed on a laptop. But it didn't work well on small-screen devices, so I developed an interim solution so that mobile users would get something usable.

Since 2018 there have been a lot of changes to HTML. HTML5 and modern CSS provide a way of producing a responsive solution that work on both small and large screens. Development was quicker because the underlying database was already there, so it was just a matter of changing a lot of scripts.

Hopefully this design will keep working for another 7 years.

David Hastings, UTB Webmaster, January 2026.