Websites & WebApps

cartalk.com graphic

CarTalk.com

Developed a LAMP server for the Car Talk radio show in 1995. It was one of the first websites to use the commercial version of Apache/SSL (Stronghold). US News & World Report selected CarTalk.com as one the world's best websites.
In 1996, I started one of the Web's first cloud companies, Server.com, which provided a suite of web-based apps listed below.
The first app was a Personal Information Manager which I announced on comp.infosystems.www.announce. It got some press (Yahoo annointed it a "Site of the Day" in July of '97) but it was never very popular.
In 1997, I developed several webapps- newsletter (ListApp), forum (DiscussionApp), calendar (CalendarApp), and guestbook (GuestbookApp) managers and a form builder (BYOApp).
In 2001, I expanded the form builder into a full-fledged online database manager (DBApp).
In 2002, I developed a suite of integrated apps for private use- email, calendars, databases, and forums (GroupApps) which I still use.
Also in 2002, I developed one of the first online RSS readers, NewsApp. At the time, I was following Dave Winer's blog and he was very enthusiastic about his desktop RSS reader, NetNewsWire. Unfortunately, the reader ran on MacOS and I was running Windows. So, I developed this app without ever having seen an RSS reader before.

I thought that by bundling a suite of services, I'd be able to replicate Microsoft's success with desktop software.

They were popular, especially the DiscussionApps. I partnered with NBCi in 1999 and Server.com became server.snap.com for awhile. Traffic reached 100 million monthly pageviews in 2001. Net magazine called Server.com one of 100 websites that changed the Net forever (Aug, 2002).

Unfortunately, not many folks Googled "suite of webapps" and I was eclipsed by more narrowly focused competitors.

Server.com became YourWebApps.com in 2008 which finally shut down in 2019.

Since then, I have stopped developing for the LAMP platform; tried the MERN stack and currently developing PERN apps.