I don’t know exactly what it is, but ever since my first intrepid steps into the world of the internet, I’ve always wanted to be a webmaster. And no, it wasn’t just the fancy title that had the word master in it that intrigued me. I was back in the early 1990′s when I first ventured online, when I was working in the IT department of our local university. We had access to the internet initially using tools like Gopher. Eventually, the first graphical browser I ever used called Mosaic really opened my eyes. The fact that it actually integrated graphics within all the textual information really blew me away. I knew, I had to be more involved with this stuff.

I was one of the first in the department to learn HTML, and a few years after leaving would take my first steps to creating my own website. I always had a fascination with games, so while I worked full time as a PeopleSoft consultant travelling around North America, I spent time creating my first video game, and the website that would promote it. I remember coming up with my first domain name during a team meeting in San Francisco. While everyone else was chattering away endlessly about the problems with our project implementation, I was scribbling down possible domain names.

Having decided on a name, I then needed to buy it, and have it hosted somewhere. One of the big gaming portals I frequented at the time I met someone who was willing to host game developers websites for free. He would even register the domain name for me. That worked great for a while, but eventually he got bored or tired of all the problems and stopped offering the service. So, I thought how tough could it be. I had an old PC at home, so I installed Linux on it, and got my own web-server up and running from home. I used a service called dyn-dns to deal with my constantly changing IP number and I was off to the races.

Eventually, one website grew into several, and I need a more reliable and affordable web hosting solution. I continue to use several paid hosting companies, and am always on the look out for more.   Since buying that first website back in November of 2000, this has been an incredible fun and fruitful experience. I continue to be fascinated by the internet, and all the wonderful services it offers. I can hardly wait to see what the next ten years will bring.