"What does the Perkulator offer that other web portals don't"?
The Perkulator Portal is the fastest, cleanest, most efficient asp.net portal on the web!
Our #1 rule and priority when developing the portal always has been and always will be to make it the fastest most efficient possible. We have 2 mottos that we frequently remind ourselves of:
Less is more and
Keep it Simple Stupid. We recognize and know how to overcome
creep.
Features are not added unless absolutely necessary. If it is our opinion that at least 50% of all websites that use the portal are likely to use a certain function or feature, then it is added. Otherwise it is not added. We will test different coding methodologies when creating new functions or features to see which way is the fastest. There is almost always more than one way to get to the same end result, how it can be coded and created has varying options.
The Perkulator is not slowed down by having all the whistles and bells (extra features) that have been slapped together for other portals. Most of the time, all those extra features aren't used or aren't used effectively, which causes more code to be executed than is necessary. This problem causes more of your server's RAM and CPU power to be used up, thereby causing your website to become slowed down. This is an especially important issue for websites that get a lot of traffic!
"Why did the Perkulator project get started in the first place"?
As mentioned before, you may want all those extra features at the expense of having to wait longer for pages to load, but we didn't!
From the developer stand point, another issue we had with using other free asp.net portals out there was that there were too many people managing each project. This is self evident when you browse the code within the projects. There is never one standard for how the whole portal is created. It is like viewing 2 paintings of a flower by 2 different artists: the end result is pretty much the same, but it is typically obvious that there were different authors. We think of this as problematic, this makes it too confusing when trying to customize the portal or learn how the portal works.
As neurotic as we are about organization and cleanliness, VB.net just simply is not our preferred language. There might be a VB.net portal out there, but we prefer C#.net. We also think that C#.net is a better choice because it confines better to
Object Oriented Programming standards. For example, the VB.net language is not case-sensitive but C#.net is case sensitive.
From a business stand point, it just made sense. If we need it, odds are that other developers or webmasters need it too.