Tuesday, March 08, 2005
The First Airgun Website
It has been ten years now since I started my site. It was 1995 when I finally upgraded my home computer to something that would be internet ready and I eagerly started surfing the web for airgun sites where I could read the wealth of new airgun information that would be out there on the web. Unfortunately there weren't any that I could find, I spent about a month searching and looking without finding anything. I thought this was a terrible thing so I started my own airgun website, the American Airguns website. It was the first published website solely about adult airgunning.
Initially I gathered a lot of the site content from airgun catalogs that I had orderd from various companies. I scanned in text and pictures and added them to the page. I also started reviewing some airguns and adding my reviews to the site. I also started a free classified ad page so that airgunners would have a avenue to buy and sell their airguns with others throughout the US and the world. It started out as an email based page where the ads were emailed to me and then I posted them on the page by hand. That was great for a while since I got first chance at all the great deals! However it quickly became too much work so, being a software engineer, I wrote a script that allows the ads to be placed on the page automatically. It has been working great for a lot of year now.
Over the past few years, work and my activities with AAFTA/Airgunning have consumed too much of my time and stole time away from my editing duties on the website. As a result my site hasn't been changed much in that time. With the site's ten year aniversary this year I have been having some thoughts about updating it, especially the classified ads. Coming soong to an airgun website near you will be an updated classified ads page. The changes wont be too drastic but I am going to change the format of the page a bit and I am going to look into adding a login feature in the future so that I won't have any more anonymous logins that has caused me grief over the years. Hopefully the upgrades will be complete in the next week or two so keep your eyes peeled. I am thinking of updating the main page and give it a whole new look while keeping it simple. As the year progresses I will roll out the changes as I have time to make them. Thanks to everyone who have been faithful readers of the site over the years.
Initially I gathered a lot of the site content from airgun catalogs that I had orderd from various companies. I scanned in text and pictures and added them to the page. I also started reviewing some airguns and adding my reviews to the site. I also started a free classified ad page so that airgunners would have a avenue to buy and sell their airguns with others throughout the US and the world. It started out as an email based page where the ads were emailed to me and then I posted them on the page by hand. That was great for a while since I got first chance at all the great deals! However it quickly became too much work so, being a software engineer, I wrote a script that allows the ads to be placed on the page automatically. It has been working great for a lot of year now.
Over the past few years, work and my activities with AAFTA/Airgunning have consumed too much of my time and stole time away from my editing duties on the website. As a result my site hasn't been changed much in that time. With the site's ten year aniversary this year I have been having some thoughts about updating it, especially the classified ads. Coming soong to an airgun website near you will be an updated classified ads page. The changes wont be too drastic but I am going to change the format of the page a bit and I am going to look into adding a login feature in the future so that I won't have any more anonymous logins that has caused me grief over the years. Hopefully the upgrades will be complete in the next week or two so keep your eyes peeled. I am thinking of updating the main page and give it a whole new look while keeping it simple. As the year progresses I will roll out the changes as I have time to make them. Thanks to everyone who have been faithful readers of the site over the years.
