Sites I No Longer Own
Over the years I have started websites that haven’t worked out, for one reason or another. I usually start a site on a whim, hoping that small ideas I have will blossom into a full sites, but often they don’t.
These are the sites that I once owned, but decided to discontinue for one reason or another.
Archive.org has done a great job of saving copies of my old websites, so although they are no longer online you can click the links to see the archived versions of them.
This was a website designed to help people find excuses for things. If you didn’t want to go to a wedding or a birthday party, or if you needed an excuse to help you have a day off work, this was the site for you. Excuses were categorised by occasion, there was an active messageboard where members posted their favourite excuses and even a Random Excuse Generator (Click here to visit R.E.G. courtesy of Archive.org) that you could click to provide you with random combinations of events and excuses. It was the first website I coded entirely in html, using an html notepad editor. I started it in 2000, and it finally died in 2008.
One of the obsessions I have is to look at words and see what other words I can make by removing one letter from them. I thought it would be funny to make a website showing a few of the words that had different meanings after one letter have been taken away. I was wrong. It wasn’t actually that funny. 🙁
It started when I realised that if you removed the A from China, you could have The Great Wall Of Chin.
I soon realised that removing letters from words was an idea that had quite a short shelf life.
InvisibleForAYear.co.uk
This was an idea I had for a fictional blog, written from the point of view of a man who had discovered how to become invisible. It would document the experimentations with the invisibility spray he had created, and document what experiences he had during the following year, which he would spend as an invisible man. The amount of preparation I did for this was immense. I spent hundreds hours thinking up ideas for things he could do, places he could find himself in and problems he would experience.
For example, would his invisibility be molecular or man-made? If it was molecular, would he be actually able to see? After all, eyes work by allowing light through the retina and allowing a reversed image to hit the back of the eye. If the back of the eye was invisible too, there would be no screen on which to receive the image. Little things like this took up far too much thinking time!
I soon realised that in order to write this blog, I would have to spend hours per day updating it. I didn’t have the necessary time to hand to allow it the full attention that it needed, and so after a couple of months furiously writing in my spare time, I gave it up. But it would have been superb if I’d have had the time.
At the time of writing this, I do still own this website. However, the external website on which the videos were hosted recently closed meaning all my content disappeared. It used to be a collection of videos of me, doing things in slow motion. Now it is just a website with a logo on, and an apologetic box where the videos used to be.
I made 1880sNostalgia after I googled “80s” and the wikipedia pages in the results had links to 80s in the 1800s as well as the 1900s. I figured that there MUST be a need for an 1880s page if the results contained references to it, and so I decided to make a spoof my own 80sNostalgia site.
1880sNostalgia.com was a black and white version of 80sNostalgia with rewritten content in ye-olde text. The logo on 80sNos is circular, and so I made the logo on 1880sNos a penny farthing bike wheel. All in all it was the same site layout, but with a little bit of additional content relating to the 1800s.
It could have been quite good if I’d have had the drive to write more of it. But I didn’t, and so it died.