Biography - Toby Joiner

The idea of building this site has been with me since early in 2003 but until recently I didn't feel equipped with the right knowledge to bring it to realisation. I am very lucky in my career as an airline pilot to have spare time in nice places where a hobby like web programming is ideal. However it was not until lately that I have felt in a position to progress beyond my fairly static HTML pages. My only experience of adding dynamic features to a site was with a splash of PERL.

Towards the end of October 2006 I finally plucked up the courage to take on the challenge of building the site following my recent discovery of PHP. This language is a dream to program with compared to PERL and I was quickly able to patch together some fairly usable scripts. Progress to MySQL to handle the database was straightforward, again using PHP, and by introducing CSS the whole formatting of the site became that much easier. I can't believe I took so long to find these beautiful tools!

The main hurdle in the site was the integration of PayPal to allow the automatic production of search results. Following some thorough beta-testing the site went live in December 2006 albeit with a few teething issues. These have been ironed out on the whole and it was only a further challenge with some email issues that caused problems to our initial customers. Another minor challenge posed by the size of the database caused some issues in May 2007, but after some careful negotiation with our hosting company they are happy to support the current size and future growth of the Joiner Marriage Index.

The site has now been running for over a year and I am pleased to say that it runs without requiring much manual intervention. Spurious results and behaviours will always crop up with anything that is internet based, but I am glad to say that these events seems to be very few and very far between. Ideas are constantly being considered for the future development of the site, but in the short term the goal is to upload all the remaining offline data in the Joiner Marriage Index to allow our now very well regarded fully automated online search facility for the whole of the Index.