..:: 20 years StarinkWorld - a "brief" retrospection [5] ::..
In 2013 StarinkWorld finally became the official website of Ed Starink. But we still remained a fan-based website – from fans for fans!Ed began to work on the second part of his Universe Symphony: The Orchestral Works.
Also in 2013 another website came up: edstarink.info built up by Ruben Schouten. This site was first based on a wiki software and also provided a forum, which unfortunately wasn't frequented that much. Although Ruben's website was and still is a private project we mutually agreed to become partner websites with a mutual chooser page (see picture). For example we link from StarinkWorld to the album section on Ruben's site the information is rather exhaustive whereas on StarinkWorld the focus is mainly on the major releases.
In the years to come Ruben made lots of changes on his site, and also drove me bananas sometimes as he also changed the top level domain for at least two times (now it's Starink Music). Thus I had to manually change all the links to his site on StarinkWorld (in the meantime I implemented a tiny tool which makes this more convenient for me).
I was often asked – mainly by Ruben – why I don't use a CMS as well. The answer is simple: although I see the benefits of a CMS I also see the very downsides of it. CMS are PHP based and often have security flaws and you always have to keep it system side up to date – for that I'm too lazy. ;-) For a rather static website such as StarinkWorld with a few updates from time to time a CMS is in my opinion too oversized. Thus I decided to have a rather slim website completely written in HTML. But I implemented also some PHP tools for an easier handling.
In October 2013 the fans had the opportunity to ask questions themselves - the questions were collected in the Facebook group and the e-mail newsletter. In total we collected more than 40 questions and finally sent about 30 questions to Ed Starink who was so kind to answere them and to share his thoughts.
As the questions came directly from the fans we named this interview the "FANterview". And there are indeed great questions and interesting insights from the master himself. By the way there is also a Dutch translation available, translated by Ruben Schouten.
In December 2013 I conducted an interview with Felix Visser, the founder of "Synton" and a good friend of Ed Starink. He convinced Ed to finally release his first part of the Universe Symphony the year before and also wrote its foreword. This is a very interesting interview with again amazing insights and you might recognize Felix's unique and impish sense of humour.
Finally we came up with a new, lighter webdesign which is already the direct predecessor of the today’s look of StarinkWorld.
