I've been on the web for a long time. I also have a terrible memory, so this page is mostly just for me. It's probably missing a lot.
My first website, which I think was called The Hooded Claw, was in 1997. I'm pretty sure this was a blog, although the term hadn't been invented yet. I can't find it in the Wayback Machine.
In the late 90's I co-created the Quake Broadcasting System (QBS). The first mention online seems to be from December 27th 1997. It turned into Webdog, where we tracked .plan file and gaming website updates with an app before RSS was invented. Somehow, part of this code still works. Once RSS was invented, it eventually morphed into Alertbear, which gave you a river of news in a Windows app.
In September 2000 I launched Chatbear, a forum hosting service. It was particularly popular with the Half-Life modding community (Valve ERC), leading Valve to host the original Steam support forum there until, you know, they had all the money.
In 20o2, Planet Groovy was a news portal and All Apple was an Apple news blog that I just never had enough time for. Apple punditry is not new to me.
In 2006, What Entertainment was the home of my TV, movie, book and music reviews.
What Film launched in 2011, pre-letterboxd, to help you track your movie watching. There's a coming soon page in the archive describing the concept years before I finally launched it. Nobody can evaluate software delivery dates.
More recently, my son and I ran a Lego news website and Youtube channel called Brick Digest.
In the business world, I co-founded Traveltek in 2002, which we grew to 160 staff. As CTO, I lead our development team as we built a travel booking system in Perl for a global customer base (as the whole web changed around us). After leaving there in 2020, I'm now CEO at TeamWeb, where we build Issuebear (in Python), the help desk for B2B. I'm also tech lead at Tour Amigo.
This is not my first blog. This is not my first website. But it's the one I have today.
And yes, I like the movie WarGames.
Get in touch. hello@richardsmith.me.