Diaries of a Webmaster, Entry 1: The Beginning |
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A good place to start any story is at the beginning, so I have decided to start the Webmaster Diaries at the beginning. At first, the Earth was a ball of molten rock, then it cooled, then dinosaurs roamed the Earth, then we made this website. Granted, a lot of things may have happened in between those events, but I wanted to make sure I hit the highlights.
Early this year (2010), John and I decided we wanted to start a website reviewing geeky things, and www.itsgeektime.com was born.
Our first hurdle was to pick a name for our new site. We went through some variations on the words nerd and geek. For a while the winner was geeky-things.com (which we still have in case we want to use it later). Even this name did not feel quite right. For starters, neither of us nor our friends are fans of domain names with hyphens in them. It also sounded a little too cheesey for our tastes (even though both us love cheese, expecially sharp cheddar). It so happens that both of us enjoy the show Leverage, and in it the hacker character once said, “It’s the age of the geek baby”. From this quote itsgeektime.com was created, and here we are today with a cooled rock ball and no dinosaurs.
Around this time at work I had started to dabble with the Joomla content management system. I decided that this would be a great platform to run our new website on as it allows non web developers the ability to create web content easily. Another great feature of Joomla is the extensive extension directory. From this directory you can find an extension or module to do just about anything you want on your site. A good example on this site is the login box, that is part of the popular Community Builder component.
Now that we had the site’s name and platform, we needed content ideas. From the start we decided we needed to review books, games, movies, hardware, and software. These are the five main areas that geekdom lives in. Soon after that we thought, “hey, wouldn’t it be nice to share our combined IT knowledge with the masses?” And thus begat the IT Toolbox and IT Question of the week columns.
These sections are what I consider the founding sections of the site. From these we have expanded to more columns and blogs. The story behind those is for another time. I hope you enjoyed reading my first Diaries of a Webmaster entry. Stay tuned for more ramblings and web developer/designer advice from me to you.
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