In 2001 when I was thrown out of left RTE, I decided to set up a little business doing web design.

The intention was to run it as a paid hobby, doing little sites for local businesses and the like.

It didn’t work out that way.

For reasons that I still can’t quite understand, the business took off in a big way, and within a year, I had major contracts with Lily O’Brien’s Chocolates to rebuild their small brochure site into a major e-commerce site, and with a subsidiary of O2 to build a major virtual private network linking all mobile phone shops to head office.  There were also numerous smaller sites and the business rapidly got out of hand.

I expanded the business to include hosting simply because it made sense to be able to provide an all in one package and to have complete control over the servers.

In the years since, I have never been short of work.  On the contrary, I frequently found myself juggling contracts to keep all the clients happy.

Over the last couple of years however, the CFS has taken hold, and I have found the design and development side to be more and more of a strain.  As this was supposed to be a hobby, not a chore, I decided to quit that side of the business and to just continue with the hosting.

Over the last couple of months, I have been doing the figures.  I have decided that the income from hosting alone does not warrant the hassle and responsibility of looking after fifty or so websites, and I made the final decision.

I am quitting.

Ending a lucrative business is not a light decision.  I have responsibilities to my clients, and they all have to be taken care of.  I have arranged that in such a way that no one should be inconvenienced in any way, and they will maybe even find life to be a bit cheaper!  From my own perspective, I will have a lot more time to concentrate on enjoying life.  I will have a lot more time for writing, both online and off.

I’ll miss the money though.

Many many years ago, I had the idea of putting my Netscape Bookmark file in the Internet.

It was a simple file which I modified slightly to ease navigation.

Over a period of months, the file became quite popular as word spread throughout the company where I worked, and people started submitting their own bookmarks.  The file grew, until it reached a stage where I had to create an actual site.

Soon, the site was picked up by the international community, and developed into one of Ireland’s foremost portals.  It had developed its own identity and had grown to a considerable size.

This site was written and maintained in my spare time and had become rather a burden.  Advertising was scarce in those days, and thus I wasn’t able to capitalise on the venture.  It was a labour of love, but it was too demanding.

In 2000, or thereabouts, the site was sold, and was removed from the public domain.  Part of the contract of sale stated that I wasn’t allowed to retain the name of the site (‘Irish Lynx’) but I did retain the data.

It seemed a pity to deny the public the resource that they had been using, so I made public the data under another name, but decided not to maintain it.

Frankly, I forgot all about it!

The directory has been sitting there for the last six years or so, and still gets a lot of traffic, though only a fraction of the traffic the original site received. 

The site is now hopelessly outdated.  I would imagine that most of the links in it are dead.  It also take up quite a bit of space on the server.

I think the time has come to give it a decent and honourable funeral?

I have been watching the ‘Cowangate’ business with some interest.

I’m not talking here about peoples reactions, so much as the effect it is having on Head Rambles.

The first post on the subject went up on Monday, and the resulting traffic stream is remarkable.  So remarkable, that I had to investigate further.

I did a search for ‘Brian Cowan portraits’ and various logical combinations of other searches and came up in the #1 slot worldwide in Google.  I see Donncha has since jumped to the top of the queue in most, but the two sites vie for the top two spots.

What is also interesting is that Head Rambles’ Google Ranking has dropped to zero!  Does Google not trust its own top ranking search results?

I’m not particularly worried about rankings as the important traffic to Head Rambles tends to come through links and RSS feeds, but it is interesting to note how easy it is to hit top spot without even trying?

Many years ago, before a lot of you were born, there was a group by the name of The Shadows.

They were the backing group for Cliff Richard and also had some considerable success as an electric instrumental group.

In 1970, the group split, and two of its founder members – Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch – decided to form a new group concentrating more on vocal harmony and acoustic instruments.  They were joined by Australian John Farrar, and the group launched themselves as Marvin Welch and Farrar.

In 1971, they produced two LPs, however they sank almost without trace.

Lately I have started digitizing my collection of records, and came across both the above records

One of my favourite tracks -

[audio:faithful.mp3]

Frankly, I am baffled as to why they never caught on.