Dear reader,
Today it is 25 years since I registered the domain Nettips.dk with DK Hostmaster. It happened on June 1, 1999, and at that time the web was still in its infancy. Google had just been founded and was growing, but the big brother in the search engine field was partly Yahoo and partly Altavista. It shows how much can happen in 25 years.
Why did I acquire the Nettips.dk domain in 1999? Yes, at that time I had the idea that I would also like to contribute a website to the World Wide Web. I was a little unsure about the purpose of the site, but after a bit of thought I thought it would be good to have a website that could help Danes expand their horizons in the area of football.
Danish games then operated the site Tips.dk, so I concluded that Nettips.dk should be the big parallel to the giant. Since I also had a certain interest in IT (and taught IT), I had the very first website created via Microsoft Publisher.
Betting suggestions for football matches
I had talented people around me, and together we created a kind of editorial team that came up with good ideas for game proposals at football matches throughout Europe. And that actually took a few years. Alongside my teaching job, I became a permanent writer in the local Funen County newspaper, where every Saturday I ran my own IT site with content from the IT world.
Since then, Publisher was replaced by Microsoft Frontpage, which could work with frames. That was big! So big that I won’t bore you with what it is. But the powder on the oddset side got wetter and wetter and in 2022 I decided to drop the idea of bringing football tips to the people. Something new had to happen.
In the summer of 2022, I teamed up with programmer Jacob Thomsen, who had ideas for a new website system. Such a thing is called CMS, and I found out how smart and easy it was to maintain a website. Now the next challenge arose: what should the website Nettips.dk be about?
Nettips = tips for the net
The answer was straight to the point: it should naturally be about “tips for the web”. This idea arose, among other things, from my concurrent job at the local printed newspaper. That’s why Jacob and I created a website with a focus on such exciting topics as Tips for computers, Tips for the web, Metatags, Good websites, Searching the web, Crazy clicks and much more.
And then it suddenly went quickly to get content produced for Nettips. The Internet had started to stir up a lot, so there was no shortage of ideas for content on the website. Just the fact that a section was called Searching the web says something about the revolution back then (hehe). Today search is almost synonymous with Google, and tomorrow it might be synonymous with AI?
Time passed and Nettips grew steadily. And it happened in a cheeky red/orange design. After some time with this design, Jacob and I thought it was time to update Nettips to a more stylish and “serious” design. We therefore opted for the blue-grey colour. The content on Nettips continued unabated with a focus on IT and tips for the web.
Debate forum is bubbling
In 2005 something completely new is happening at Nettips. We create a debate forum where there is room for everyone. The atmosphere and jargon in the forum is ordinary, quiet, cozy and jovial. We quickly sensed a great interest in this opportunity, where everyone could contribute loosely and firmly. We quickly felt the desire to help each other with questions in East and West. However, we also found that it was important to have administrators in the forum. More on this later.
In 2013, we choose to change the saddle a bit. We adopt a different solution within websites. It’s called Joomla, and at the time it was really a big banger. Unfortunately, this also meant (in hindsight) that we lost quite a few readers. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that we lost a number of good positions in Google’s search results.
Nevertheless, we continued undaunted knowing that the income on the website would decrease. In the past there have been a few kroner involved from advertisers, but personally I have never earned a kroner from running Nettips. The money that came in via ads (and it wasn’t a lot of money) went to running the web hotel and discussion forum, and once a year at Christmas time I tried to pamper the volunteers at Nettips.
It just doesn’t work without volunteers, and no one on board Nettips has ever received wages, a paycheck or vacation pay. All have done so on a 100 percent voluntary basis. Respect. And thank you very much for that. The loss of readers also meant that I could not continue with Joomla. We switched to WordPress in 2015, which is the system that still resides here on the channel.
Should I close Nettips down?
And it has been so many years that I am at this moment considering re-designing Nettips for a new layout. And having said that, I also wonder if it is now time to put a “Closed” sign in the window. Many things have happened over time, and from having volunteer writers on the website as well as advertisers, I am now the only one who writes posts for Nettips. And there are no advertisers, so the whole party is paid for out of my wallet.
It will be more than painful to have to shut down Nettips, but conversely you also sometimes have to face some realities. Do I still have the nerve to look forward another year, or is it now that we are quietly closing the doors? Is there support from anyone in here? Do you even care to read more into this now outdated way of communicating?
A big thank you to…
Back to administrators and volunteers at Nettips.dk. Over time, many nice people have been connected to the site. None mentioned none forgotten. Nevertheless, I would like to thank these people for their enormous efforts:
- Jacob Thomsen: without Jacob and his magician at CMS, Nettips would have been buried long ago
- Hans-Georg: The major contributor to articles and as an administrator in the forum. Rest in peace, dear HG.
- Putterhunden: With this alias, Putterhunden made his foray into the forum as an administrator, and he performed this job superbly. Rest in peace, Fart.
And now to the two active helpers:
- John Westcoast: for many years John has been an invaluable help in the debate forum, and I owe you an extremely big thank you for that, John.
- Queen: Last but not least, Queen must be mentioned. She is the super sweet admin in the forum that makes people love to come there. Thank you, dear Queen.
Thank you all
To all of you others who have contributed: BIG thank you because you were there in the fight to elevate Nettips as one of the greats on the internet. Without your voluntary efforts, these lines would not be written.
The debate forum contains over 200,000 posts. This has happened in over 41,000 different subjects. Just read the numbers again. Impressive, I think. If I close Nettips, what happens to all these gold nuggets? At worst, they fall away. It is almost equivalent to putting a match to a geek archive on Vestergade.
Dear Reader, Thank you for reading this post. As can be seen from the above, it has been quite a journey to get from 1999 to 2024. If keyboards could gossip, you’d get a lot of good laughs at the funny and witty stories that have fallen into the columns. Both about Real Madrid, the Tippeligaen, viruses in Windows, entertaining websites and much, much more.
Check out Nettips.dk through time on the Internet on Wayback!
Source: nettips.dk
