Avalon5 Concept
Avalon5 Background
The Avalon5.com project was born in February 2005 from a combination of two specific items; namely boredom and spam. I had a personal website perviously with email addresses attached which were being spammed to hell and back and I was determined to start again with new email addresses and better security, so I moved ISPs, created a new domain and began thinking about what to do next. Once appropriate security and filtering was in place I considered what to do about a new website and options. At this point I also had some time to spare and decided to play a little with the new site.
The name Avalon5 was born out of desperation. I’d tried to get a proper domain name, but for every single possible title I picked – some other sod had already bought and reserved the domain. At this point I just decided to pick something for the hell of it and then do whatever it took to make it work. I went with Avalon because of its roots in celtic mythology and “5″ simply because I’d had 4 previous websites of varying degrees of success and this was to be the fifth incarnation.
Avalon5: Website Concept
The project concept was simple… I wanted to find out how far could I get with some technical knowedge, a desire to NRTFM (Never Read The Fucking Manual), a princple that I would ONLY use free or open source software solutions and a guiding principle to ALWAYS TAKE THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE. These four key tenants of my new project formed the basis for all decision making as I set out to see how far I could get.
First up was a basic website – which has now been replaced by this WordPress blog because it’s so damn good!. After I’d achieved that I started looking at other options, and quickly moved on to installing and configuring a Photo Gallery solution (Coppermine Photo Gallery) and a Forum (phpbb) – all associated with the Avalon5.com project.
Avalon5: Howl @ The Moon! Blog
After that I started on getting my blog (Howl @ The Moon!) up and running, and then it took over my life for a while as I began to customise and theme it. Once I got it to a stage where it was stable I started working on content rather than functionality and then that took over my life for a while as I started to get regular readers and commenters and realised that I seemed to have an opinion on just about everything that was happening in the world. Howl @ The Moon was well and truely born in the wild at this point.
When I realised how popular my blog had become I then decided that I’d forge ahead and see if it was possible to market the brand “Howl @ The Moon!” even though the website was called something different (i.e. Avalon5.com), and it turns out that such a crazy thing is actually possible, without spending any money at all. Once again my desire to do things using only open source proved to be effective.
Avalon5: Howl @ The Moon! Ideals
In a structured and ordered world there should always be a little room for wildness and uncertainty. The world has gone policitally correct, conservatively facist and religiously pious – a state of being I find repulsive. The whole point of the Internet is to have a free medium to exchange ideas, help debate and form views and get what is really going on in the world (no media management, no filtering, no positive spins)… just the raw hard facts of the matter.
Avalon5 is a place for such debates and discussions, it’s a place to unlearn all that you thought you knew about religion, technology, politics, chaos thinking, world domination, humour, weirdness, security, films, books, sex, global stupidity and a whole lot more. So why don’t you leave reality behind for a while and come join in the insanity?
Avalon5 Today
As of April 2007 I took the decision to migrate my original Avalon5.com site and blog (Howl @ The Moon!) from a Windows/IIS hosted solution to a Linux/Apache hosted solution. The decision was a long time coming due to various limitations I’d hit with the Wordpress software, but the upgrade to V2.5 was the last straw as it broke bits of my website and it looked like the only way I could get full functionality back was to migrate away from Windows/IIS.
Then, since I was going to migrate the site anyway, I took the decision to completely revamp the layout and functionality using a new theme and to rebrand the whole thing as Avalon5.com rather than “Howl @ The Moon!” to see what impact that would have on my google page ranking and popularity. It’s a work in progress, but then that was always the point of setting up Avalon5.com, as a way to experiment, learn and grow with the Internet and the open source community.
I guess it’s up to you to determine if Avalon5.com (in it’s latest incarnation) is a success or not, but like everything I doubt it will stay this way forever. Life is change, and change is good.
