This is one of the things I did years ago that, with hindsight, could have been so much more.
I started up a website on the urging of some people from one of my Usenet hangouts nearly 10 years ago. It was specifically about demystifying university entrance interviews (and exams where applicable) at Oxbridge, something nobody else did at the time. It was as successful as I could hope, at the time; plenty of people visited and contributed their experiences, we got written up in the national press, we even had takedown requests from certain colleges.
My failure/regret is dropping it instead of growing it. It was partly because the tech running the site was terribly outdated (initially it ran in ASP on an Access database. Really) and although I'd converted it to PHP it was still the ugliest code I've ever written. (In my defence it was my first 'big' webapp type project.) As a result of this crazy spaghetti monster of code and associated bad practices, at one point I lost the live database and just... never got around to restoring an old backup.
Looking back, the site could have grown massively. There was a clear demand and we were ticking nice boxes such as university access for all, state school equality, etc. We could have expanded to other universities, personal statements, traditionally difficult subjects, internship advice, graduate careers interviews, etc. We could have ridden the social wave. We could have charged. Etc.
I'm pleased with the first year or two of the site but the fact I just kind of dropped it and got on with other things still annoys me. I was incredibly strapped for time but looking back, I could have done it. Really, I hadn't figured out what I wanted from the whole thing. I just thought it was cool that I'd made a website and got people I'd never met to contribute to it. Once I'd sort of achieved the 'have a website with some information on it' goal, I lost interest, and never really thought about how it could really become something big.
Someone else thought so; they bought the name (not the domain, funnily enough) when I let it expire, and copied the format - and the content, including my lame humour - word for word. They're not growing it either, but they haven't been graceful to me (basically yelling at me for letting the site die, thus irritating my own annoyance at the same) so putting my hat in with theirs to take the site places isn't really an option for me any more.
I started up a website on the urging of some people from one of my Usenet hangouts nearly 10 years ago. It was specifically about demystifying university entrance interviews (and exams where applicable) at Oxbridge, something nobody else did at the time. It was as successful as I could hope, at the time; plenty of people visited and contributed their experiences, we got written up in the national press, we even had takedown requests from certain colleges.
My failure/regret is dropping it instead of growing it. It was partly because the tech running the site was terribly outdated (initially it ran in ASP on an Access database. Really) and although I'd converted it to PHP it was still the ugliest code I've ever written. (In my defence it was my first 'big' webapp type project.) As a result of this crazy spaghetti monster of code and associated bad practices, at one point I lost the live database and just... never got around to restoring an old backup.
Looking back, the site could have grown massively. There was a clear demand and we were ticking nice boxes such as university access for all, state school equality, etc. We could have expanded to other universities, personal statements, traditionally difficult subjects, internship advice, graduate careers interviews, etc. We could have ridden the social wave. We could have charged. Etc.
I'm pleased with the first year or two of the site but the fact I just kind of dropped it and got on with other things still annoys me. I was incredibly strapped for time but looking back, I could have done it. Really, I hadn't figured out what I wanted from the whole thing. I just thought it was cool that I'd made a website and got people I'd never met to contribute to it. Once I'd sort of achieved the 'have a website with some information on it' goal, I lost interest, and never really thought about how it could really become something big.
Someone else thought so; they bought the name (not the domain, funnily enough) when I let it expire, and copied the format - and the content, including my lame humour - word for word. They're not growing it either, but they haven't been graceful to me (basically yelling at me for letting the site die, thus irritating my own annoyance at the same) so putting my hat in with theirs to take the site places isn't really an option for me any more.