Why Is This Website Here?
This website started out as a gift from a great friend of mine, Dave, someone more like a brother to me than anything else. (Dave, Jen and their boy Liam can be found over at The Walshes.net. It all started back on June 7th, 2004 while Dana was about 8 months pregnant with our soon to be born daughter, Sarah. (She’s the kid you see plastered all around the website) It was Dave’s thought that a website would be a great way for us to share pictures, videos and whatever else I could come up with over the days that led up to Sarah’s birth & as she grew up. Needless to say I took the idea and ran with it. I went home from the hospital the night Sarah was born and put up her 1st pictures…
The original idea was to provide a way for our family and friends to check in on us at their leisure, to read what Sarah was doing and look at new pictures when they wanted to; I didn’t want to be the parent that whips out the slides or a 400 page photo album every time we had a visitor come over. (Not that the thought hasn’t crossed my mind…) After 8000+ pictures in 4+ years I could drive anyone insane…
As time has passed this website has really grown into a memory book for Sarah as she grows up. It is my hope that one day she’ll look back and read the posts from the 1st week or 2 after she was born and see how we felt about her and what was happening in our lives as she grew older. With any luck she will appreciate the little things about this website like the 2 years worth of old webpages that had to be converted into blog posts and photogalleries along the way. And if we ever have another kid I have set a high bar to live up to all over again…
Warning… Here comes the tech stuff… This site started out as a collection of simple static webpages in 2004 and soon evolved into an online diary with far too many pictures to manage. I discovered the pages I was updating manually could be managed far easier with blogging software like Movable Type. That worked great for a time but it wasn’t inclusive enough. The site had become a blog, calendar & photoalbum. All were separate and managed independently. It was better, but not perfect.
I came across WordPress, and quickly saw that it was similar to Movable Type but offered more in the way customization through tone of plug-ins, widgets & themes. It was also much more content management friendly and not as threatening on the learning curve as something like Joomla. It was excellent at making things much easier to administer and run as well as being a completely open source project with a huge support community.
Throughout this time we have had 2 webhosts, we needed more, much more, storage space for the pictures and a pile of layout and design changes.
Thanks for reading!