OK, you probably know the Mum and Dad got together bit, I mean how did I end up here, writing this blog?

Well, after spending most of my twenties being serious about rugby I got a bit of an ankle knock that put me out the game for a while (as it turned out - permanently). Several months of being a Championship Manager junkie followed.

On my 30th birthday I received various cards with £10 and £20 pound notes from relatives I barely remember. I decided to put the money to good use, and make more of my time in front of the PC.

So, on January the 9th 2003 (22:01:40 UTC) I bought my first domain name, and followed up quickly by a stupidly expensive hosting package from uk2.net. I then proceeded to learn a bit of HTML, and create a not very inspiring “shopping directory”. Well, who didn’t?

 I had come across a guy who was a bit of a graphics wizz in one of the forums I used, and paid up for a nice logo for aforementioned shopping directory. He did a lovely job, and then did something very important: introduced me to PHP! Shout out to Andy!

So off I went and taught myself the ins and outs of PHP, and the further complications of PHP-Nuke. Now as anyone can vouch for, having a full time job and learning PHP doesn’t allow much time for other things, like..um..speaking to your wife.

So come June/July 2003 and with a few PHP sites up and running, I start talking to Chris about some link swaps, and then about SEO and other stuff. I started helping him out with converting a site he ran from HTML to a database-driven PHP masterpiece. We worked from August through to our relaunch date the 5th December 2003 pretty much into the small hours every night. Again, not so good for the whole marriage thing!

Things went well and the site went from strength to strength. Thanks to the great Google gift that is Adsense, it also made a bit of money. We started to get enquiries from other people/companies to build sites for them and before we knew it we were fulltime web type people! Yup, no more proper jobs. As much as we’d worked very hard to get to this point, some sympathy and praise must go to our very understanding, never nagging wives.

So that’s a quick summary of how I came to be HW Techie, and why I got bored enough to write a blog.

Other people and influences I’ve had on this internet journey who deserve a mention:

Robert Woodhead- The first how-to guide I read on how to get your site out there.

Dave Child - I understood mod_rewrite thanks to you!

Worth mentioning I’ve never met or even talked to these gentlemen above, but thank you anyway!

34sp.com - Our web hosts (especially Ian).

John - Big Idea Media - An inspiration to keep working bloody hard in the wee small hours.

Clarke Duncan - aka Supercod - My Scottish inspiration, who I think I annoy from time to time!

Well, thats it so far, many thanks for staying tuned!

Bookmark to: