I mean, technically I’ve been making websites of increasing quality and difficulty since I was 10 or 11. I remember opening up W3Schools HTML quicklist, filling a notepad document with tags and using the now defunct Yahoo! Geocities as my gateway to the internet. Then it was drag-and-drop free editors from Wix or Weebly and now it’s almost pure coding, libraries and understanding what on earth is going on with all these JavaScript frameworks!
A humble start, breaking the rules.
Friends in school used to request music videos or flash games from websites that were blocked by filters and I would embed them on my website instead which wasn’t banned. Net-nannies nowadays are much more complex and often just ban unclassified websites as default, but for a while – rightly or wrongly – I was using basic HTML to be naughty.
Later in secondary school, I created a mouse based maze game in PowerPoint taking inspiration from a popular “Pointer’s Way” example and then in Sixth Form I enjoyed leading the A-level ICT classes myself with talks surrounding home router security (by literally hacking a WEP32 BT HomeHub in class), binary based encryptions and the emergence of crytocurrencies. No, I didn’t purchase any Bitcoin at the time.
Needless to say, I wasn’t particularly popular with the IT technicians in my school however I was briefly enrolled on a CISCO Networking course due to my interest in technology, achieved top ICT GCSE grades and an A-level too. As someone that recently migrated from a Marketing Department into IT, if I didn’t appreciate them before I certainly do now!
And now we’re here.
This subdomain of my portfolio website was pretty much a proof of concept for installing WordPress into my FTP/cPanel hosting package without upsetting the main site. I did have to modify my .htaccess file – see, temporarily remove until I fix – as I had inadvertently prevented access to the install.php file by cropping file extensions. My bad. But that was the point, it was a short and productive learning curve.
I have no idea how often I’ll write here and I’m not planning to promote it directly. Perhaps it will become my quiet corner where I give my two-cents or maybe it will just gather dust like a forgotten side project, who knows!