It was twenty years ago today that the first incarnation of my website was born.
It started life as a few scripts and notes put on the internet so I didn’t have to carry them around on floppy disks or CDs when I was moving around between contracts. I had been working with Oracle technologies for five years before the website was born, but most of the early content was Oracle 8i stuff.
I added new articles now and then, but I guess it really started to take off when I was preparing for the Oracle 9i OCP upgrade exam. For the 7.3, 8 and 8i OCP exams I used books to prepare, but for 9i OCP I decided to do the beta exam. This meant there were no books available yet, so I had to do it the hard way. I wrote my own revision notes for the whole of the syllabus and put them on the website. They got pretty popular, as free things often do. 🙂 From that point on I just kept adding articles on a regular basis.
Over the last 20 years the site has gone through lots of changes, but also stayed reassuringly the same. It takes a lot of work to keep producing new articles, but what most people don’t see is the amount of time that is taken up reworking some of the old articles. Some of this stuff was written 20 years ago and I come back to things and want to hang my head in shame. Someone will ask a question about an article, I will read it, hate it and rework it. It’s a never ending job, and the more you write, the more you have to refactor down the line. 🙂
Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the last 20 years. It’s not over yet.
I was checking my calendar, thinking I was about to jack it in for the day, and I noticed it’s April 1st, which means it’s my 14th year anniversary of being an Oracle ACE. Can’t believe I nearly missed that!
As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year.
25 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
20 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or current name: 31 August 2001)
Another year has gone by, and somehow I’m still doing this. 🙂
As I’ve mentioned numerous times, last year was tough year for me. So far this year is going better. That’s partly because I’ve reduced the amount of travelling I’m planning to do, which has freed me to do more fun stuff, like writing and doing the odd video.
As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year.
In July I will hit the big five zero.
24 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
19 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or Current name: 31 August 2001)
A combined 2 years as an Oracle Developer Champion, now renamed to Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador. (21 June 2017)
I thought it would be fun to do a little time travel and look at the website over the years. There were a few really bizarre things I tried out in the early days, including a Gothic horror theme, but I don’t have a record of them and the Way Back Machine only goes back to 2001. You know you are old when the Way Back Machine can’t go that far back! 🙂
So skipping the first year of existence and starting in 2001 the site looked like this.
This was still using the old name before I switched to the current name and URL.
Later in 2001 I started putting the latest articles on the front page and the menu includes link to my Oracle 9i articles. Bleeding edge! 🙂
Things stayed pretty similar looking until 2006, where a new column was added to the front page. I put a rating system in place for the articles, but didn’t know how to stop the search engine spiders from clicking them, so pretty much everything got something like a 2.5 star rating. I quickly removed that and salvaged what little pride I had left.
In 2010 I tried to clean up the look of the site a lot. I removed the left had menu bar and used tabs and quick links instead. I think this was the beginning of the site looking a little more like it does today.
In 2011 I got a bit sick of the washed out colours and increased the contrast. The basic layout is the same though.
Things stayed pretty much the same until 2015, when I switched the site over to use Bootstrap 3. Prior to this I was forever tweaking things for browser compatibility, and having a responsive design was way beyond my meagre web skills. Bootstrap solved loads of problems for me.
The upgrade to Bootstrap 4 a few days ago made some slight changes, but I’m guessing hardly anyone would notice.
This time next year, the site will look … exactly the same. 🙂
