What can I say but “Welcome”. The site is built by me dovesnet of dovesnet.co.uk, and I’d like to take the time to thank you for visiting the site and having a look around. This site has developed over the years and has taken on many different appearances.
It began before dovesnet was created back in 2000 with my first ever website, what I like to call MADpeace (v1.0), this started life on the old Yahoo based Geocities network. Then in 2001 the site pushed forward with webspace provided by my ISP and with the purchase of a domain name in April of that year, took on a whole new look. I called this MADpeace (v1.1).
As time has progressed and a couple more domain names purchased the site needed to take on a new look to reflect this. In 2003 I had reached a point where the content from all the domains could be brought together and separated with simple levels of authority. I pointed all the domains to one site, was this me being lazy? No I thought it would ease maintenance and unite all the surfers of the net with common interests… honest. This became my version 1.2 of the site. All still based on the same visual concept as v1.1.
This version of the website has been pretty much the standard template since then. Apart from the odd update and tweak to various pages (usually the photo pages) nothing has really changed.
In 2005 I had registered another domain (evod.co.uk) which came with changing my ISP but a couple of years later in 2007 and after changing ISP’s about half a dozen times (not by choice but because the ISP was an unknown small company that kept getting into difficulties and being taken over (or re-branding they wouldn’t say), that’s my fault looking for cheap ISP’s). However as the price of ADSL service became more competitive, in 2007 I eventually moved to a reputable provider and was happily with them from that point. However, this did mean that evod.co.uk was no more, but it was a small price to pay.
In 2008. Looking at the site as it stood, it still looked good (basic but good). The content was sparse, some of the features I liked as they helped me to develop my skills in the early days but were a bit dated and unnecessary. You know what it’s like, you learn something new and you overkill it. My biggest trauma though was discovering that 90% of the links that pointed to external sites were just dead links!!!
A new life begun for us in 2008 with the birth of our first child which spurred me on to give the site a bit of a face lift. So it was time to strip it back and keep it simple in design but with all the content (although back in 2003, what I now class as simple would have been hard work, ha, bless).
In 2010 hosting arrangements with the ISP ended. Not through any disappointment with service but I needed to have some server interaction which was difficult with free web space provided by the ISP. This is when I decided to get into hosting myself and in May of that year dovesnet.co.uk was created and a new site to hone the skills and provide assistance to anyone who may think I could help them was developed and sits there even today. I migrated the MADpeace site to the new hosting service where it stood as a static site for a while, while I concentrated on building on dovesnet. This did mean that once done I could turn MADpeace into a more generic recreational site but what?
In 2012 after seeing an article about Content Management Software MADpeace finally got the facelift it had been waiting for, this time to be powered by WordPress, not for ease of use as being a traditionalist I thought using CMS platforms was a cop out and if it wasn’t done by hand with plenty of sweat and headaches then its not a proper site. Of course that’s rubbish and I found that this was a good opportunity to learn more about CMS but I still crammed everything I already had on the site into it so it was neat and manageable.
At the beginning of 2013 it was stripped back to basics and all the old dated content stripped back with it. In an age where there are popular social media sites provided by the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter I felt as they have all my old content added over the years within them now anyway I could have more fun with MADpeace and that’s what I did with the blog and added forum software.
Back now to a basic blog site, at the time of writing this all the links work, please let me know if any of them become inactive. If you have any thoughts or comments on the site or you have suggestions or want to make additions, please email me and let me know.
Credits
Lloyd Naylor, who without him back in the early days the whole MADpeace thing probably would never have been!! Gemma Dove for her artistic input (which was so inspiring as she herself is, I made her my wife). Rich Lambert for the initial Game Review idea which came and went and lead on to other feature rich content. Mick Halliday for his generous feedback. ‘Nuff Rispec’ to you all!