Dave Harm of daveharm.com has kindly awarded this a site his monthly “Pass It On” award.
Check out his blog Naked Daze with Dave too co-authored with Snowdrop for some great inspiration poems and posts.
Rather nice to get my first proper “award” and not the bogus “Health Insurance scam awards I’ve been sent in the past.
Well I never thought I’d manage a month off the drink when I first left rehab. Well having just passed my 12 years sober this little old website is now celebrating 10 years.
So I’ve given it yet another face lift this time the Mystique wordpress theme from http://digitalnature.eu/
Back in 2001 there were not that many AA/recovery sites around and this website was a little hobby of mine that while oft neglected has kept on going.
Here’s what it looked like when it was running off an old PC running linux in my flat on the end of a flaky ADSL line
The content hasn’t really evolved that much, added and taken little bits away over the years. One surprise was an old 3d AA logo I made in a graphics program called Bryce4 that got used all over the place. AA Birthday Cards in San Francisco, AA convention fliers even cropped up unlicensed in an IPhone app. Never usually mind my stuff being used in AA things and always nice to hear when they’ve been used somewhere. Although it’s also taught me to water mark all my flickr and gallery pics these days.
This site still gets over 1,500 unique visitors each month. My thanks to all the people who’ve stopped by, left comments or emailed. I’m afraid I’ve not always been that good at keeping up with some of the things that I’ve been sent over the years.
Amazes me the sheer size of our AA fellowship and the diversity of the members all over the world. Once even met someone in a meeting who said they’d seen this site before coming to their first meeting.
So who knows if this site will last another 10 years, the internet has changed so much in the past 10 years who knows where it will be by 2021……………. Keeping Anonymity in line with Tradition 11 in the age of Facebook provokes so many challenges.
Lets hope AA can keep pace with the technology changes, AA GB has it’s updated website and excellent AA email responders, lets hope it keeps itself available to new comers through the next “big thing” especially with the internet going more mobile and pervasive in our everyday lives. I sound like a right old git when I tell the kids I didn’t have a mobile phone till I was 24 and the internet used to come over our phone line through a noisy modem and you couldn’t use the phone while you were online with your 56kbps max connection.
Keep safe, keep sober, and if your thinking of doing something about your drinking all I can say is, it was the best thing I could ever have done. It wasn’t always easy in the early days but it’s certainly been worth it. Hey I survived past 25 so that has to be good.
Trying to get this old site listed on Technorati and keep getting stopped with
Jun 28, 2010. The supplied description is inadequate, or does not seem to match the content of the site. Please update your claim with an appropriate description below and choose the “Update Description” button.
Lets see how many times I can re-write
Personal AA recovery site and photoblog including things useful to my recovery from Alcoholism and snippets of my life.
Update 7hrs Later
Seems they could go with the following.
Personal AA recovery site including AA Words of Wisdom, Big Book Audio, Recovery Links as well as experiences of recovery from alcoholism. This site also incorporates my photoblog with a love of low light, landscape, seascape and architectural photography.
Very quick “10 min” upgrade to the latest and greatest version of wordpress went smoother than a babies arse.
Should be mostly transparent to the presentation of the site but makes using wordpress as a CMS rather easier. All the plugins I use are still working too, which is a bonus.
Fabulous job by the WP team who produce this rather excellent free software.
Happy New Year to the Internet and Recovery peeps, this must have been the quietest Christmas Holiday I’ve ever had and I must say that the break has been much needed. Contrast that to last years Christmas Ghana trip, for my brothers wedding, it has certainly been less eventful and far colder but good all the same.
Passing on a message that was given me in my early days which was to be careful post holiday period. Particularly after my first few Christmases in recovery I found, having had my defences up against the excesses of the period around me, January was quite a comedown. There also seems a higher than normal rate of relapse after Christmas, so I will, as usual, up my meetings for a bit and get back into a regular routine.
Keep Safe and Happy.
Thanks to the lovely Sérgio Luís Lopes Júnior and his very clever IEs 4 linux script for wine and some free time finally, I got to test this site with Internet Explorer for the first time in a while, not surprisingly the layout was screwed on IE only, so hopefully now fixed for everyone still stuck on IE.
Also finally got round to fixing the sobriety calculator “235,177,452 seconds” Yay……..
The newly revamped gallery section is starting look to presentable too, although in the interests of preserving Tradition 11 and to protect the innocent and the not so innocent all those pics with people in em have had to be hidden from public view.
How Bizzare the internet is, this little collection of AA stuff and my idle posts on random stuff somehow ranks seventh in the Alexa ranking for UK AA sites listed in the dmoz Open Directory Project… http://www.alexa.com/
Also ranks 9th in Europe not sure how accurate that is but sounds kinda cool, I only hope this little site spreads the message a bit.
