American Airguns Blog
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
10 Year Aniversary
This month marks the ten year aniversary of the American Airguns website. It was ten years ago while I was living in Palm Bay Florida that I got my first internet ready computer in the spring of 1995. I had gotten my first adult airgun just a few months earlier in September of 1994, it was a Beeman HW97, and I was already addicted to airgunning. I plugged in my new computer and got on-line. The first thing I went out on the web to find was airgun information. I thought for sure that there would be tons of sites with lots of good information on adult airgunning. I spent most of the summer looking for airgun sites, any airgun sites, but found none. There wasn't anything but a rec.guns newsgroup that talked about guns mostly and occasionally airguns. My interest in HTML was growing during this time and I realized that since there weren't any airguns sites I would just start my own. I was a software engineer by trade so generating a website wouldn't be that hard.
So I got started. I genereated the main page, much as it is today, and started scanning pictures. Luckily for me, we had a scanner at work that I was able to use after hours. I scanned in all kinds of pictures and articles that I had in manufacturer catalogs and anything else I could get my hands on. I got the basic page developed and launched it early in November 1995. At that time, it was the first and only published airgun website on the web. About three months later the Airgun Letter got their site running and had a really nice forum on it for a lot of years.
In the meantime I also was looking at other gun sites, the few that existed at the time, especially those with classified ads on them. Most charged a rather large sum to put ads on the site and the site only had a few guns listed on them. That was when I decided to add a free classified ads page on my site. In the beginning, all the ads were emailed to me and I inserted them onto the page manually. After a year or so the page popularity grew and the putting that ads on manually got to be a real hassle, I had to format a lot of the ads so they would look half decent before putting them on the page. Then I stumbled onto a script that would email a form to an email address. Great, I used a HTML form to submit the ads to me via email in a format that was ready to be put on the page. This was better but still, they had to be placed on the page manually. Then it dawned on me, hey, I am a software engineer, why am I doing this by hand when I could write a program to do it for me? I bought myself a book on Perl programming and developed a program that allowed the reader to place and remove their own ads. The program completely automated the page and gave me the power to delete any ad from my web browser. That is basically where it is today. I plan to add some type of login to the ads page in the future, I just need some time!
The page has grown a lot over the years and has been a lot of fun for me over the years. I now average over 2000 hits daily and have a few advertisers on the page to help pay for my costs running the page. The page may get an overhaul in the near future, time permitting, to try to keep it relevant. If any of you have any thoughts on ways to improve the site or have suggestions for it, please let me know. I have had a lot of airgunners use the page over these past ten years and I hope that it continues to be a service to the airgun community into the future.
So I got started. I genereated the main page, much as it is today, and started scanning pictures. Luckily for me, we had a scanner at work that I was able to use after hours. I scanned in all kinds of pictures and articles that I had in manufacturer catalogs and anything else I could get my hands on. I got the basic page developed and launched it early in November 1995. At that time, it was the first and only published airgun website on the web. About three months later the Airgun Letter got their site running and had a really nice forum on it for a lot of years.
In the meantime I also was looking at other gun sites, the few that existed at the time, especially those with classified ads on them. Most charged a rather large sum to put ads on the site and the site only had a few guns listed on them. That was when I decided to add a free classified ads page on my site. In the beginning, all the ads were emailed to me and I inserted them onto the page manually. After a year or so the page popularity grew and the putting that ads on manually got to be a real hassle, I had to format a lot of the ads so they would look half decent before putting them on the page. Then I stumbled onto a script that would email a form to an email address. Great, I used a HTML form to submit the ads to me via email in a format that was ready to be put on the page. This was better but still, they had to be placed on the page manually. Then it dawned on me, hey, I am a software engineer, why am I doing this by hand when I could write a program to do it for me? I bought myself a book on Perl programming and developed a program that allowed the reader to place and remove their own ads. The program completely automated the page and gave me the power to delete any ad from my web browser. That is basically where it is today. I plan to add some type of login to the ads page in the future, I just need some time!
The page has grown a lot over the years and has been a lot of fun for me over the years. I now average over 2000 hits daily and have a few advertisers on the page to help pay for my costs running the page. The page may get an overhaul in the near future, time permitting, to try to keep it relevant. If any of you have any thoughts on ways to improve the site or have suggestions for it, please let me know. I have had a lot of airgunners use the page over these past ten years and I hope that it continues to be a service to the airgun community into the future.
