About This Site

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 Β£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 did so well that I made enough money to buy it outright. Still the most I've spent on a domain, and money well spent. FreeNetName was eventually absorbed into the ISP madasafish (read the full history here), but my domain was all mine.

And thus began my slow takeover of the Interwebs. I must have around forty domain names now - I just keep on buying, 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 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 there'll undoubtedly be more.

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.

I used to hack away at a lot of blogs, sites and so on. Some are now frozen in time (either due to Blogger discontinuing FTP publishing, or simply due to lack of time!) and some continue to roll merrily along with occcasional updates. These include:

  • Into The Unknown - started as a Sunday evening idea, 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 the BSc in Music Technology I obtained at Birmingham City University. 
    • LHC@ITU - a sister site of Into The Unknown, focusing specifically on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. Dormant almost as long as the LHC. I should really do some updates on this, there's loads of cool stuff the LHC's told us!
  • Nontitled - a small (but perfectly-formed) Tumblelog, where my original goal was to post something fairly often which let you break away from whatever you were doing, sit back and think for a few minutes. An excuse to press pause on life and give yourself a minute to muse on stuff. Subscribe to the Nontitled RSS feed and just check in when it's updated for peak enjoyment.
  • About Brum - now not really maintained as I've moved away from Birmingham city centre, but for many years I ran around highlighting various aspects of the city, 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 was also host to early forays into podcasting - its inaugural instalment was presented on the site in July 2009.
  • Kerblam! - my first blog, now a time capsule. I posted whatever materialised in my nog. 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 Blogger was just a side-project of Pyra Labs [wikipedia, official bio].

I have more sites either coming soon / in skunkworks (or more accurately, planned during pub visits)...

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 bots. Drop me a message on Twitter and I'll see it pretty promptly.

The first image used at the top of every page on this site was 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 - you can find the original here (CC-BY-SA).

 

I took few other shots during my stay there, although being on the first floor, it was more trees from my window.

I've since added more header photos - taken around Birmingham, London and elsewhere. You can find lots of my photos on Flickr.

Don't forget to browse around the site and explore all the post categories! There's plenty more to see than just the front page.

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