Just one? But I’ve worked on so many…

Debenhams was the first website I ever did any professional work for. This is Local London was the first website I was responsible for the upkeep of. ipoints was the first website I ever really enjoyed working on. I’ve spent the last few years working on a bunch of websites for various large pub companies, and that’s been fun.

But I can’t really do a rundown of sites I’ve been involved with with putting Ninth Art squarely at the top of the list. It ate 5 years of Andrew’s life, and a lot of Antony’s and my free time on a less sustained basis. It remains the single website I’m proudest to have been involved with, even if most of what I wrote for it make me cringe now, but y’know, some of it’s coming up on a decade old, so y’know. I still don’t know how much of an impact 9A had on anything, really, but what I do know is that a number of people I like and respect were kind enough to say good things about the site, and every now and again, I do randomly meet people who remember the site, and say kind things about it, and even if the site did nothing else, I do very much miss sitting down with Andrew and Antony over drinks and talking rubbish about comics, and it gave us an excuse to do that.

I’m quite profoundly fucked off about the error at the DNS company that lead to us losing our two original domain names for that site, and having to buy the .org instead, and do periodically check to see if their of them have become available again. I also keep promising myself that I’ll rebuild publishing engine for the site, just because I’d like little things like nicer URLs on the articles, even if it is only an archive these days.

I’m kind of vaguely looking for a project on a similar scale to get involved with again, just because, well, 9A has been inert for a few years, and I don’t like that the single website I’m proudest to have been involved with is that old. There’s a few other websites I’m working on that I really like, but they’re small, private community things, rather than anything public, and I do quite fancy doing something digital and public that isn’t just blogging again – I don’t think I’d write for anyone again, but the idea of building a bespoke content management system for a website I genuinely cared about, that’s got some appeal, and I know I’d do it better this time around. One to think about a bit more in the new year, I guess.