About

Owned and operated by Mark and Lesli Watson, berserko.org has existed in several different incarnations over the years.  It started as Mark’s personal web site back when he had a dialup account with Onramp.  It was originally just a place to post photos and funny quotes, which Mark started posting with some regularity when he arrived at Benchley in 2000.

Eventually, the site became too limiting (it was all static HTML with a Perl script on the backend making the photo galleries), so Mark rewrote it from scratch using PHP.  This site was much more sophisticated and allowed users to create accounts, post quotes and photos, and comment on posts.  Thus was born berserko version 1.0.  This was the first time that the standard berserko color scheme of crazy colors was used.  Also, the site was moved from a commercially hosted server to run on Mark’s own Linux server (a 400MHz Pentium II – plenty fast, baby!).

Soon, berserko v1.0 was outgrown, so Mark rehosted the web site to run on XOOPS.  The standard XOOPS install was heavily rethemed and the berserko colors were tweaked to make the site look nicer.  The XOOPS framework allowed for MUCH more flexibility (probably too much) in what the site could do.  Berserko v2.0 was born!

Then the unthinkable happened – berserko.org was hacked.  An unknown hacker (or bot) exploited a security hole in one of the XOOPS update scripts to break into the website and send spam.  Mark quickly disabled the compromised update scripts and locked out the spammer while building a new website based on Wordpress.  Wordpress was (and still is!) much simpler than XOOPS, but did everything that was needed.  With the new Wordpress site finally in place, berserko v3.0 was born.

For more than six years, berserko.org was hosted on Mark’s own Linux hardware running under the desk at his home office.  Finally, in 2010 it was time to change that.  Mark and Lesli switched from an expensive wireless broadband ISP to a much cheaper and faster DSL connection.  A residential DSL connection makes it nearly impossible to run a home web server without paying big wads of money to the DSL provider for a static IP (not to mention it’s against the terms of service and ISPs block the HTTP and SMTP ports).  By now, commercial hosting had become an affordable option, so the web site again changed hosts to justhost.com.  The web site now contained more than 10GB of information, so the initial upload took several days to complete.  The site was put onto the latest version of Wordpress with all the bells and whistles (OpenID logins, Disqus comments, echoing posts to Twitter, etc.).  Berserko v4.0 was BORN!

Enjoy the new site!