Over the last few weeks I have been moving the content from one of my other sites, The Williams Database, to WordPress. This means that all my sites are now running on what I consider to be the premier content management system but if I had acted differently a few years ago that might have not been the case.
In 1996 I launched a fan site to the Williams formula one team. In those days there wasn’t much of an internet to speak of, connection speeds were slow and access was costly but it was new and great fun. My initial website was all based around a few plain html pages with a few images to spice things up a bit. However, I quickly realised that every time I added a new page I was constantly having to go back and edit other pages to ensure that the links still worked and that the new content could be found. There had to be a better way.
By day I earned my crust as a developer doing a mixture of COBOL and PowerBuilder, far removed from the internet world but I felt that I was a good enough programmer to do what was necessary. At around this time Perl was the weapon of choice for web development so I got some books and found some references and code snippets online and started to get the knowledge I needed.
Pretty soon I had a workable system that allowed me to parse text files and output them as html and as my knowledge of Perl improved so did the sophistication of the scripts.
#####################################################################
# Define Variables
#####################################################################
# Load the configuration variables
require "setup.cfg";
require $library_loc;
#####################################################################
# Processing
#####################################################################
# Parse Form Information
&parse_form;
# Print Header
&header;
# Action Request
print "The Williams Database - $FORM{'title'}n";
Eventually my scripts ran a number of my own websites and one for Jim Bamber the well known and respected motorsport artist and cartoonist. His requirements were to be able to upload his weekly cartoon to the site and then add a caption and description for each. This was achieved through a basic administration panel that you could log into and then either add or edit the details of each cartoon. The image itself having been FTP’d to the site.
While MySQL was available it hadn’t been around that long and so I took the decision to write my own rudimentary database engine based on flat files – not very elegant but it did work. This along with the admin centre gave me what was now a basic and functional content management system.
This took me to early in the 2000’s, the latest last modified date on the header of the code is around January 2001, and then life intervened. I no longer had the time I once had, my children required more of my time as did my job. By this point I was now head of development at a software company and just a couple of years away from starting my own business. So development stopped and while the sites continued to run the functionality remained firmly stuck in the last century.
I gave the code no more thought until my server was hacked last year and I discovered that my 12 year old code had, unsurprisingly, been written with the security of that time and hadn’t kept pace and was now a risk to all my sites on the server. I took the decision that I couldn’t update the code and that it would be a huge task to start from scratch so the sensible option was to move to something more modern and supported. I selected WordPress as I was already using it for other projects and like it.
Several months later all sites have been migrated to WordPress and my old Perl code retired but as I looked back I realised that there were striking similarities in what my code was trying to achieve and the early WordPress. If I had been smarter and more savvy I might have made more of the code but I simply didn’t recognise the potential opportunity.
And that’s the point. It is sometimes all too easy to create something that fills a hole or fixes a problem but how many have the ability to be able to then stand back and think “Would this be of use to others? Could I make something more of this?” and then it is something again to then act on that thought.
If I hadn’t been too close to what I was doing and focused on simply my problem I may have been sitting here today typing this in my own content management system, rather than into WordPress. What’s more others could have been using it too. Is that a likely and realistic scenario? Who knows, maybe in an alternate universe everyone is using Neilpress, but I do know that without looking at things from a different perspective it will not happen.
Stand back and recognise the opportunity.