What is Powderworks.net all about?
Powderworks.net was first created on June 21st, 2002 as a personal site for displaying my Resume` and to play around with Photoshop and HTML. I had taken a class in HTML and had a load of fun building my first website about the solar system. I don't have my first version of Powderworks.net as it was lost to a hard drive crash. (Have we backed up today?) The logo to the right was from a site that I never really developed that was hosted at WKU. When I registered powderworks.net, I copied these files as a placeholder for the site. These were replaced about a week later.
Today, Powderworks.net has evolved into a community technical interest, project collaboration and entertainment site. To understand what it is today requires a little knowledge of where it's been.
Why?
I am asked regularly why "Powderworks" and why I had an email address of "powderburned" at one time. A "Powderworks" was the generic name of a civil war artillery plant. The name has gone out of style but generally speaking, a "powderworks" is a place where they make things that go BOOM!
So, why would I name my site after this?
"Back in the day..." I was very interested in fireworks and rocketry. So much so that I had made a few small fireworks and many small rockets. I had originally intended on making a fireworks and rocketry interest site with some information on how to make your own. And thus, the Powderworks.net address was registered. Eventually, I gave up this hobby as it was becoming increasingly obvious that I could get into some serious trouble over it.
Evolution
Over time, I tinkered with several ideas and mostly used the site to learn web design skills. In 2003 Powderworks.net became a temporary site for my "side business." When my side business became my full time business in 2004, I built a new website called casesolver.com.
The site just sat there for the few years - neglected. After moving in 2006, I began thinking about Powderworks again. Having moved to Tennessee to be with my new family, my brother's family in Florida, my parents in Kentucky and my friends scattered all over, I decided I wanted to build a place for everyone to land and check in with each other.
In July 2007 I built a CMS version of Powderworks.net based on Joomla. This would allow me to quickly create a very powerful site with a real community focus! On November 28th, 2007 the new site went online. Over the next two years I devoted this site to two purposes:
- Personal Community - I still wanted the site to be a place for my friends and family to meet and catch up
- Technology Community - I also want to create a place to share technology ideas and hopefully learn from each other.
At the end of 2009, it was becoming painfully clear that the site was not serving either of these two communities very effectively. I split the personal aspect of the site off to another website for family and friends and re-developed Powderworks.net to fully serve the tech community.
2010 and a new beginning
Powderworks.net was completely redesigned in early 2010 to be a tech support and enthusiast community. Our focus of mutual benefit was adopted from the spirit of the Open Source philosophy - knowledge should be freely available to everyone. Since the real world limitations of having to earn money to eat gets in the way of this sometimes, we decided to build a community to distribute the load between several like minded people. In exchange for contributing, members earn points that can be exchanged for various uses such as advertising or virtual shopping on the site.
Today
The mission of Powderworks.net is now and will continue to be the free and open distribution of knowledge and ideas in relation to technology, science, and all things Maker!
Thank you for visiting - and contributing!
Andy