Since the start of the year the site has been running the tagline 'Celebrating ten years of chrismoyles.net', commemorating the fact that I launched the site back in 1998. As of last month - the 1st June to be exact – that milestone was reached and the site moved into its eleventh year of existence.
1998 seems like yesterday, but saying 'ten years' seems like so long ago. To give you a flavour of just how long that is, we're talking about a time where web browsers and the 'Yahoo' homepage looked like this:
If you tried to use Google, you would have seen this:
Visiting Radio One led you to this:
If you were on the cutting edge of mobile phone technology, you wouldn't be talking about the imminent launch of the iPhone 3G, you'd be going crazy for the Nokia 5120:
- Nokia5120.jpg (21.01 )
And, if you were one of the few who chose to visit the site dedicated to the newest early morning Radio One recruit, then heading to
http://welcome.to/moylesworld would take you to the below – the initial incarnation of what later became chrismoyles.net:
Things were certainly very different back then, Moylesworld was hosted on the free webspace that came along with my ISP connection. Unlike now, your only connection option was dial-up and you had to pay for the privilege of being a customer of any particular ISP. This meant the site was pretty hard to keep up and running, and even harder to keep up to date.
I used to record the early show, which was initially from 4am – 7pm on a cassette – and then listen to the speech later that morning, making a quick note of anything worth saving. Clipping those excerpts to MP3 and then uploading them to the site was a long and laborious process. Compare that to the system in place today – a custom written fully automated recording and clipping system with an easy-to-use web interface (courtesy of the technical genius of 'console')– and you can see how much things have changed.
From the humble beginnings described above, chrismoyles.net now uses the resources of seven web servers to provide almost half a million downloads per month. The site serves more than 2.1 million pages per month and approaches half a Terabyte of monthly data transfer ... and still, like the day it was launched, is free for you to use requesting no donations or subscriptions.
Who knows if the place will be here in ten more years ... I certainly didn't think it'd be here now. As time ticks by and the site becomes more and more of a resource for people to find out about Chris, his radio show and his television activities, it becomes harder and harder to close it.
As the officially unofficial site, chrismoyles.net plugs a nice gap in what Radio One can offer you (and what his management company should offer you), to hopefully bring you a site you'll come back to visit and even perhaps contribute to through our forum or news submission page.
It's a bit self-congratulatory .. but happy 10th anniversary me .. and thanks for visiting.
