Twenty years of wineanorak!

Today, I officially told the world about the new wineanorak website! (See the press release here.) It has been online now for some 20 years, and I’ve recently redesigned it. It has been the most significant update in this time, and it was needed. The Internet has moved on substantially in these 20 years, and my updating hadn’t quite kept pace with new developments, for some reasonably serious technical reasons (chiefly, I didn’t want to lose the continuity with the past: there’s a lot of material there, and most significant updates mean starting over again.)

The new website comes with new functionality, and a new contributor, my colleague Treve Ring. And it is already sending out some really strong new content. More of this to come. For now, I thought it would be fun to look at how things have changed with time.

This is what wineanorak looked like in summer 2000, just six months after launching. It was a start. By the standards of the time, it was OK. It started getting some nice traffic. I began earning advertising money (£30 cpm back then).

In September 2001 I started a blog. It was the second ever wine blog. The oldest is no longer active. To this day, you can follow my blog back to the first ever post. That’s kind of cool.

In January 2006 I switched my blog to ‘blogger’, the google-owned blogging platform. I was there for four years before switching to wordpress.

This is the post I put up in February 2008: it’s the day I left the day job and went full time. A significant moment. I had two kids who were 11 and 12, and I was the sole earner at the time.

In 2010 I redesigned the site. The main page was still static html, and I switched the blog to wordpress. This was to last 9 years. By the time I made the next switch, it was creaking at the seams a bit. But technically hard to update without losing the old content.

The wordpress-powered blog. By the end, most of my material was going on here.

So the big change, launched today. Everything is on wordpress. The blog (where you are now), and the main site. The blog is now more of a blog; the main site is a magazine format, and gets the bulk of the content. It’s exciting to see things move forwards. It has been a fun journey, and not one I could have planned.

I also now have a mailing list: subscribe here for updates, and also for exclusive content!

And here’s the press release of the new launch.

jamiegoode