James Wiseman

I thought it worthwhile mentioning a few words about my old JamesWiseman.com site.

In 2001 I took a 5 month sabbatical from work and went travelling. The destinations were New Zealand, Autralia, Singapore and Fiji, and its fair to say that I had a ball! Most people did not have a digital camera, but I went armed with my trusty 2001 Digital IXUS 300.

With this, I was able to take literally thousands of pictures. The law of averages won through, and some turned out spectacularly. When I got back, I sifted through the pictures and picked out the best.

Meanwhile, the previous owner of the domain name, a fellow in America who went by the name of Jimmy Wiseman, had seemingly lost interest, or had accidentally let this domain expire. I had been watching this for some time, and was in there like a shark. I snapped it up for three years as soon as I could.

So my first attempt at the site was a series of static HTML pages (generated by a program I had written, mind you). It was a load of pictures for people to look at, so I added a bit of navigation, and some text, and suddenly Google indexed it. Hooray!

By this time I had moved jobs and was starting to write ASP. At which point it occurred to me that I could do the site a whole lot better if I did it in something similar. PHP was available on my website host, so off I went. PHP.NET was a wonderful place to go for all the information I needed.

I then started writing JavaScript, and that fitted in quite nicely, thank you very much. I had spiffy whizzing menus, and I was learning lots.

Then it became hassle to add new pictures. It was a lengthy process, so I set about writing my own interface to do this. I could upload pictures, set text, update my database, add pages, all at the click of a button. Before long I had a very crude content management system.

Then a few people wanted to buy my pictures. I had them published in magazines, and everything! Google accepted my site a valid publisher, and money started rolling in from their Adsense program.

I hacked around, bolted things on, extended, changed and fixed. I had a look at the code recently, and my word, its messy! But, that site taught me so much about web development, SEO, image management, image editing, watermarking and photo stitching. Even though I would do it all very differently today, I am still quite proud of it.

I recently found a web archive of the site, complete with the aforementioned previous tennant, Jamie Wiseman

The old site is still hosted here, but by default this blog is now the root page of the site.

I stumbled across this the other day. The Internet Archive project may have stored what your site looked like 5 years ago on the WayBack Machine

Personally, i think this is an astounding project. I got to see the very first incantation of this site and a site that I ran at university that got wiped from the servers when I left WAY BACK IN 1999! For anyone interested, they’ve even got a picture of me from way-back-when.

Moreover, some of the links from these pages, some long since dead, are also archived as well. My goodness! It’s a trip down memory lane. Sorry, back in a minute…

…A colleague commented on this. “So, it doesn’t matter what you delete from a webpage, as there could always be a record of it somewhere!”

Google and Microsoft go back to 1996, which seems to be as far back as it goes. Interestingly enough, the first web page in the world only goes back as far as 1997.

Fortunately, Internet Archive give you a way of removing the site, however what my colleague said could ring true. Who knows what else there is out there? And, not just stuff that is online, I’m talking about results of crawls that are sitting offline somewhere; possibly on some government server.

I got all this after looking up the site on strategicfirst.com which also estimates the value of the site. I would be interested in seeing that algorithm, especially as the value changes if you resubmit it.

Incidentally, this domain is quoted as being worth $5000. Any takers?

By the way, Google was $220 Million last time I checked. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t sell even for 1000 times that.

Thought I’d mention a little word about the host of this site, Micfo.com

Apart from a few issues here and there, I must confess I am on the whole quite pleased with Micfo’ s hosting of this site.

It’s been parked on their servers for five-or-so years now, and have mostly met my most important requirement for a web hosting provider.

Factors such as price, speed and support are all impartant, however, for me not as much as the following statement:

“I wan’t to be able to ignore them”

Yep, quite simply that. For about 9 months I didn’t even visit a page on my original site. Admittedly, things could have gone wrong without my knowhow, but looking through some of the MySQL tables that have access log times, I don’t think so.

So, thanks Micfo. Here’s to another five years.

(p.s. if you want to upgrade me for writing this, then feel free )