It's now the year 2022. And as I'm fond of saying, "The years are rolling by like a freight train at notch 8". There have been all sorts of milestones that have come and gone in the last several years. So it's only fitting that we celebrate yet another one. This time the milestone is the website itself. Yes, Spew Radio, as of early 2023, will have been up for 20 years. Holy heck! A lot has transpired since I first put this site up, and it should be interesting to recount the history of the site and what influenced me in my decision making. So let's get started....
The Beginning (Or when the earth first cooled):
I first got the idea to put up a radio-related website back in the early 2000's, after stumbling across a couple of sites run by other nostalgic radio ops. Most notably the ones I enjoyed most were Woody's CB Gazette and Retrocom. I spent a good amount of time reading the articles on these sites as their authors painted a wonderfully nostalgic look back on what operating a CB radio was like back in the 60's and 70's. Of particular interest, on Retrocom, was a section which contained a collection of on-air recordings from back in the day. As I had a collection of vintage recordings as well, I wanted to share those with other radio enthusiasts. So I contacted the Retrocom site owner (Retro Dave) and offered up my recordings to add to his collection. He added them to the site for a while, but issues with his ISP and using too much storage, resulted in my recordings being dropped after a while. So I began to think about creating my own site to host the recordings, and add some anecdotal stories of my own (and I had many). But I knew practically nothing about website design, nor how to go about finding a server to host it on. And for sure, I certainly didn't want to pay for any of it. To add to the complexity of the situation, I was still using a dial-up access ISP at home to access the internet at the time, so I wasn't all that hopeful. But then I got a lucky break or, more accurately, a virtual kick in the butt. My friend Art started playing with a website of his own, revolving around powering his website entirely off of solar energy. So he started helping me to understand the nuances of creating a website. He gave me a copy of Microsoft's Front Page software, and I was soon hunting and pecking away at the fine art of web design. I also found out that my ISP account included a 10 MB disk storage which could be used to host a website, so I was off to the races. So in early 2003, Spew Radio Inc. was born. The site started up with little more than my complete list of CB radio recordings. But I started adding colorful stories and other local references. But I soon ran into a problem. Yep, it doesn't take long to fill up 10 MB, especially when you have large files like pictures or audio MP3's. Art offered to host the large files on his server, and I could just link to them, so that's what I did for a while. Conversely, the text files that make up a story or editorial, don't take up much space, so I was able to continue writing, which I found that I really enjoyed doing. It was great transposing those memories of my glory days on CB radio, into print form, to be preserved for all eternity (hopefully!). My website design skills were crude and basic at best. I was never big on fancy tricks that eat up bandwidth and disk storage space. So this site was, and still is, a function over form, substance over style design and will probably always be that way. At least as long as I'm still minding the store.
Growth and Expansion:
The next thing that I did, was to expand the website to include both my Ham Radio experiences, and my boating exploits. I also ditched dial up, and changed ISP's by the beginning of 2004, and moved the page to where it currently is. Unfortunately, the size of my disk storage had not increased (10MB) at that time, so I still had to keep my larger files on remote servers. Art was still hosting my audio files, and I had started using photo sites like Photobucket to store my pictures. This would come back to bite me when they pulled a fast one and started wanting to charge for allowing remote hosting. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I continued to add stories, biographies, radio reviews, and editorials, as well as adding some examples of the insane tech projects that I was involved with. Articles were also added to the Boating and Ham Radio sections as time moved on. I also undertook a neat project using Bing maps to document the location of all the known locals in my area, along with their associated channel groups and time frames. This took a fair amount of effort to create and it was good for a while. But eventually Bing changed their system and all of my data was lost (bummer). Someday I might try to recreate it using some other map service. One of the most popular features on the website for a good while, was my streaming audio server. I had the audio piped in from one of my vintage radios (a Royce 1-640), along with video of the S-meter, to a laptop server, linked to from the website. There, anyone could listen in to the comings and goings on our local channel (13), especially during our weekly Wednesday night Classic Radio Roundup. I had all sorts of check-in's on that server from all over the world at times. Alas, the server that was hosting the streamer went belly up and I never really got around to fixing it. But it was fun while it lasted.
The last several years until now:
The website has been running pretty much on autopilot for the last 8 or 9 years. I'd started to run out of interesting stories and other material from the 70's, so I started adding information from our local group's recent activities around collecting and restoring vintage 60's and 70's radios. So the Classic Radio section was born. But competing activities, mainly revolving around raising my daughter and parcipating in her softball teams and tournaments, as well as distractions from the "newfangled" social media sites, have slowed my contributions to a slow dribble. I have been periodically cleaning up bad links, and trying to keep things working. Art eventually lost interest in his website and shut it down, forcing me to move all of my audio files back home. And as was mentioned before, thanks to Photobucket's bait and switch tactics, I've also been slowly migrating pictures back to the main site. Thankfully my ISP upped the disk storage to 10GB, so I've got plenty of room now for all of my files. But it is a time consuming process converting over. One that I attend to when I have free time (which is rare), and when I'm in the mood.
The Future:
Who's to say what the future holds. I have no idea how many years I have left in this world. When I see increasing numbers of old friends, radio ops, and high school classmates passing on, I can't help but wonder when my number will be called. Also, I'm slowly approaching retirement. That could change a whole lot of things. It could give me way more time to pursue things like writing. I also might end up moving to a completely new state (or at least another county), which would change the ISP and URL of the website. But it'll still be there. Yeah, the future is still unwritten, but let's all hope for the best and I'll try my best to keep the memories of the best years of CB radio alive.