I was about to write something along the lines of “readers of my blog may not be aware that I also run a website where I give away and support a number of open source projects” - except of course I then realised that this blog now lives on the PluggedOut domain, so you probably know what’s there if you’ve been nosey.
I have been writing code and giving it away as “open source” for a long time. It all started about 4 years ago when I wrote myself a simple PHP blog script - back when “blogs” were the “new thing to do”, PHP was the new black, and MySQL was this wonderful new-ish free database. I write the basics of it one lunchtime, and was talking to a colleague at work about it - he said “why don’t you make this available to other people?”
I uploaded the script to Hotscripts the next day (after tidying the code up a bit), and we were both amazed - it got hundreds of hits within hours.
A few days later emails started to arrive from people using the script, asking questions, suggesting features and so on - and of course this led to the creation of webpages, support forums and so on. “PluggedOut” was born.
So - we roll forwards several years to last weekend. Following a rather strange email from what can only be described as an “angel investor” I went and checked through the PluggedOut webite - and nearly fell over. The site receives in the region of 500,000 hits a month. That translates to somewhere near 50,000 page feeds a month. That’s a LOT.
Here’s a screenshot of the “Official” PluggedOut Blog, where I write about techie / geeky stuff I find from day to day (I find myself in the somewhat privilaged position of working with web technology, so know about a lot of things way ahead of the curve)…
Feel free to visit the PluggedOut Blog and record it’s RSS feed into whatever reader you use. I write regularly in it, so it’s a good chance to “geek out”
When I started all this, I had no idea where it would lead - now I have a website that is visited by hundreds of people each day, and corporate sponsors who are chucking money at me (well… admittedly small chunks of money, but still…).
I wonder where it will all lead?