Worldoweb Turns 10 – A Trip Down Memory Lane

Wow, Worldoweb turns 10. Many things have happened in the last 10 years. We have seen Apple, Amazon and Google dominate the technology field. The annoyance of subscription models to in-app purchases becoming the firm favourite to drain anyone’s bank account. I hope you enjoy reading part 1 of this series of WOW’s trip down memory lane where we compare worldoweb from 2008 to now in 2018.

Read Other Parts in the series

• Trip Down Memory Lane – Web Design
• Trip Down Memory Lane – The Rise of Linux

Worldoweb Turns 10 – A Little History

In 2008, I sat at home building my 1st website for my friend’s jewellery business. Whilst building the website using PHP I came across and tested many scripts. I needed a contact form on the website so I tested many form scripts. I decided to note these down on paper. Paper gets lost and recycled so I decided to make an online diary. I was also interested in computer security, or lack of it in Windows OS, so I thought I would combine both. WOW was born!

Decisions

In 2008, researching the internet for blogs would have WordPress.com or the rival blogger at the top of any search engine. I decided to go with hosted WordPress as I didn’t know anything about setting a server up. It was easy to set it up, all I needed was my email address and a password.

I justifiably wanted the right design, but the hosted version of WordPress was rather limited back then. After some deliberation, I opted to go for a self-hosted blog. I researched web hosts and came across relatively cheap hosting. I took the plunge and there was no turning back.

Naming Convention

Figuring out what I was going to call it was another task. Not wanting to call it something that tied me to a particular subject, but catchy enough so it rolls off the tongue. I looked around and came up with the world of the web, then did my Yorkshire thing by removing bits from it and came up with worldoweb.

Visualising a logo with a world in it! I bought it and was now in charge of a website and domain. Yikes! What the hell do I do with it?

I discovered wordpress.org and downloaded WordPress 2.6. Back then the only option to install WordPress was to upload the files onto the server. Looking back, I do believe that it gives you more of an understanding of how it works with the database.

Worldoweb, with WordPress, installed, now what? Change the theme to something more suitable. I browsed the WP Theme Directory, downloaded one and uploaded it to the server. With limited knowledge, I tweaked the theme to suit my requirements and even created my logo, badly!

First Post

Yay, I’ve started a blog. Let’s get posting. My first post was a comparison of 3 different PHP forms that I had written down earlier. I sat back and admired my blog post like a proud child when mastering to read. It was the start of things to come and I would never know I’d be doing this 10 years later. I learned a lot more through this journey.

Conclusion

Worldoweb was born from a simple idea whilst building a website. It’s true to say I had no knowledge of WordPress when I started. I’ve learned from any mistakes and gone on to build bigger and better. Here’s to another 10 years! See you in 2028.