About This Site | ChrisWoods.co.uk

So you found the About page. Well, might as well put something in, right? Here's a little bit of backstory...

ChrisWoods.co.uk was the very first domain I ever registered - through FreeNetName, a dialup ISP around in the 90s which offered you a free .co.uk domain name (!) with your dialup account. The only caveat? The domain wasn't really yours (they owned it), and you had to use their dialup service to add files to your web site. To take ownership of the domain properly, you had to pay £70 to Nominet for a change of ownership - some people bartered or blagged the change of ownership with FreeNetName eventually, but I paid for mine. This was a big thing when I was a kid, but fortunately the really successful Young Enterprise company I was part of at the time gave me the money to pay for it, so it was money well spent. FreeNetName was eventually absorbed into the ISP madasafish (read the full history here), but my domain was all mine at that point.

And thus began my slow takeover of the Interwebs... I must have around forty domain names now - I just keep on buying them, and I've lost count now! Some I own and don't even have web sites on, either due to ideas scribbled on the back of beermats which I've never followed through to realisation, or some which are sitting waiting for me to finish working on them. Either way, it's something I get a strange satisfaction from - and I doubt I'll stop buying more in the meantime!

Today, I can occasional be found with my business hat on, doing design, IT consultancy, building and maintaining PCs (and generally anything that involves computers or technology!) through my company CustomMade. In partnership with longtime friend Elliot Wilson and his company Konnections, we also offer high quality, totally bespoke web hosting packages for individuals and businesses through CustomHost.

In my own time, I actively maintain a handful of web sites. These are:

Into The Unknown - one of my more recent blogs, focusing on technology, the future, interesting industry developments and almost anything I find exciting. I take a special interest in the music industry, partly due to having done a four year degree BSc in Music Technology at Birmingham City University.
- LHC@ITU - a sister site of Into The Unknown, focusing specifically on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.
Nontitled - a small (but perfectly-formed) Tumblelog, where my goal is to post something fairly often which lets you break away from whatever you're doing, sit back and think for a few minutes. An excuse to press pause on life for a few minutes and give yourself a little time for reflection and contemplation. (I should be sponsored by Kit Kat.) Subscribe to the Nontitled RSS feed and just check in when it's updated for maximum enjoyment.
About Brum - a web site highlighting all aspects of the fair city of Birmingham, West Midlands, with a special interest on the parts of Brum occasional visitors or strangers to the City might not see. Lots of focus on social media, behind the scenes, creative events and the history of Brum. About Brum is also a party to my first foray into podcasting - its inaugural instalment was presented on the site in July 2009.
Kerblam! - where I post whatever comes into my cranium. My first personal blog, and an old-aged pensioner as far as blogs are concerned - I first set it up on the original Blogger platform in March 2001, back when it was just a project of Pyra Labs [wikipedia, official bio].

I have more sites either coming soon or being planned...

If you'd like to email me, feel free - I'd love to hear from you. Sadly, we live in spammy times... I've had to obscure my email address from the spambots, but it's fairly trivial to reveal it if you're a human. Just click this link to open the reCAPTCHA dialog, enter the words (or type in what you hear in the sound clip, if you prefer) into the CAPTCHA and my full address wil be revealed.

As well as getting my email address, you'll also be helping the reCAPTCHA Project to refine their OCR systems and identify difficult or obscured words from books and other publications, so it's a win-win situation for everyone.

The image used at the top of every page on this site is a crop from a panoramic photo I took in March 2006 from the sixth floor of my tower block in Halls - the building called Calthorpe Hall - whilst a student at BCU (formerly UCE Birmingham). You can find the original here (licence: CC-BY-SA). I also took a few other shots during my stay there, although being on the first floor, it was more trees from my window.