Wizard's Place

They call me the Wiz. It’s short for Wizard and and some people think it has to do with being a whiz with computers. Actually it has to do with my early involvement in role-playing games on bulletin board systems (BBS) long before the Internet existed. Although I now work extensively with WordPress (WP) and WordPress Multi-User (WPMU), installing websites and designing themes, I’ve been hanging out around computers and the Internet for a long time now; in fact almost longer than I care to remember.

My very first real experience with computers was a high school Math trip to Waterloo University, in Ontario, Canada, where I got to write my first computer program on punch cards using the venerable, and quite unforgiving, Fortran programming language. The process didn’t impress me much and I really had little, if any, interest in pursuing a career of any kind in computers.

Almost a dozen years later, in 1979 and with several different businesses under my belt, I began working professionally with computers for the first time when I partnered with a long-time friend to set up the database support operation for Heart Lake Distributors. Lee and I were years ahead of ourselves trying to make a brand spanking new Commodore Business Machines Model 8032 do things for us it just wasn’t built to do!

I bought my own first computer, a Commodore 128, not long afterwards, and actually purchased the exact same 8032 several years later. I still have both, in working condition, today.

But it wasn’t until 1989 when I decided to get really serious about computing. It was actually before the Internet was public and before the World Wide Web had even been invented. With a brand new PC clone complete with a 30 megabyte hard drive and a 2400 baud modem I was ready to get online.

I started my first e-commerce venture on that computer which quickly led me, eventually, to a multi-line bulletin board system (BBS), partnering in an Internet Service Provider (ISP) company, eventually owning my own ISP, and figuring out this whole web/HTML thing in order to create a few of my own websites.

Over the years I have created hundreds of websites and thousands of web pages but, until recently, and like the shoemaker who’s children have no shoes, all but two of those many websites were for others.

The first two websites I created for myself, made in 1996 and 2002 respectively, and shown in screen capture images below, are now in the past, relegated to back-up CDs somewhere in a dusty box. This site, which replaces them and contains some of their content, continues the story.

It is always interesting, and most often fun, to create a new website and, I suspect, this one will be no different. Learning the ins and outs of a new content management system in the process makes it a little more involved but it continues to show me the exquisite power and flexibility of the WordPress system. Nice!

Today, thousands of web pages later, I am involved in several on-line enterprises, working with my wife in our own operations and joint-venturing with several other entrepreneurs with whom I collaborate on e-commerce solutions, web design projects and, most especially these days, WordPress (both stand-alone and multi-user) design, installation and consulting.

For more about the Wiz, when available, look for the drop-down menu under “THE WIZ” above.