Past Projects: Gaming Advanced
Posted April 17, 2009 @ 10:21pm by Phil
Gaming Advanced was my first serious website and first attempt at creating something more than the token personal page with cats dancing around. My friend and I were really into reading IGN at the time, and I thought I could make something comparable but that didn't require the PRO membership to get full access to the site. I can also remembering thinking that if the site got big enough, companies might start sending me free video games.
I started out using SHTML to include the header and footer (I have always disliked doing tedious work such as modifying a thousand pages everytime I make a small change to the header) before moving to PHP. During that time (around late 1999), using PHP and MySQL to build an interactive site wasn't very common. Finding a web host that even supported them was a challenge. Once I experienced the power of PHP, I began implementing features that the big boys had such as a custom content management system, user comments, polls, user registration, advertising system, etc.
In fact, I spent most of the time implementing those features, and very little time writing content. Over the three years that I ran the site I had only written maybe fifteen items of content. It didn't matter though, because in those days there were very few video game related websites out there. I can remember being on the first page of Yahoo! (I didn't use Google at the time) for keywords such as gaming and video games. I can also remember getting 300-500 unique visitors a day. Those were the days!
So you are probably wondering what happened to the site. Well, being young and stupid I did not see the opportunity I had to really capture a chunk of the web, and just let the domain expire once I had lost interest. Even though it is unlikely my site would have been able to compete with the many content-packed video game sites that have surfaced over the years, I still regret it just fading away. Oh well, at least I got some valuable experience and a story to tell my kids someday.
