Twenty years ago, in 2006, I launched this blog to show my projects and hobbies after registering the domain name in August 2025 for my personal email.
In the early years, the posts mostly featured modified game consoles and photography-related posts. The first, published in June 2006, fitting a 7" LCD from a Goodmans portable DVD player and a modified Xbox into the dashboard of my Citroën Saxo. Fibreglass, filler, a mains inverter wired to the car battery, and a relay so it could be switched on with the head unit.
A lot has changed since then. The site itself has been rebuilt more times than I can easily count, moving from PHP to classic ASP.NET WebForms through several redesigns to the current Razor Pages version. The content has stayed through it all, with some posts over twenty years old now sitting alongside whatever current project is on the workbench.
Looking back over the past 20 years, the blog has documented many milestones in my life and projects with my website design business, Apexweb LTD, which I started in 1998 continuing in the background, and it was a Raspberry Pi post in 2012 that led directly to the creation of AB Electronics UK, selling Raspberry Pi expansion boards and accessories.
Home automation, radio repairs, car mods, CNC builds, solar power, a DIY Pick and Place robot and more recently home servers and sensor projects for our home.
30 years of Virtual Swanage
This year also saw the anniversary of the launch of Virtual Swanage, the community site I built for my home town, which has been running since 1996, ten years before this blog existed, which makes 2026 its 30th year online.
It started long before broadband, before social media, before most people had heard of the internet, and it's still going, still updated with local events, businesses, places to stay and a huge historic photo archive with photos of the town and surrounding area.
Over the past few months we have spent a lot of time working on further optimisation of the Virtual Swanage website with both the front end and back end code to reduce load times and improve overall performance. Many of the pages have been updated with new information and content including new photos of local towns, villages and attractions.
Moving onwards
Over three-hundred posts and twenty years later, the reason for keeping this blog going hasn't really changed. It's somewhere for me to share and document what I've been building, for my own reference and to hopefully inspire others to build on my work.
I hope the projects and posts are useful to blog visitors, and I welcome your comments and feedback on any of the posts and projects.
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