This whole site began as sort of a homework project. A little background... In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web while working at the CERN project. For him, it was a means of sharing information across computers in a universal format. But it wasn't until 1993 - when HTML was released for public use - that a proliferation of websites began to emerge.
Our company was trying to establish a website. We formed a project team to work with a consulting firm that would design and create the site. In my role as support, I went to a week-long workshop to learn HTML and how websites and the web worked. I decided to put my new found knowledge to work by creating Louisiana Fly Fishing Journal. Everything I had on that page had to be typed in HTML, uploaded with an FTP tool, validated, and if any issues, rinse and repeat! It was very time consuming, but I learned a whole lot about HTML and my experience became invaluable to our project work.
The following year, HTML2 was adopted and the first domain names arose and so I modified the name of this website to its current name, "Louisiana Fly Fishing". There were only about 30 fly fishing websites at the time, compared to almost 6,000 by year 2005. One of my mentors for the layout was Kevin McKay, of MaineFlyFish.com, one of the very first fly fishing webpages. Kevin also helped me pick out a forum software to integrate with this website. Incidently, Kevin is a Maine guide whom I've fished with on a couple of occasions.
I decided from the start to make laflyfish.com an independent site free of any advertising. And to not make it "complex". In hindsight, that was a wise decision! Over decades, I saw how websites became beholden to their sponsors. It gave my product reviews far more credibility. And when life and work issues came up - and many did - I never found myself thinking I'd have to abandon a high-maintenance site.
From 1997 to 2013, laflyfish.com had one the most active forums of any state-centric fly fishing website, and Louisiana's third largest fishing forum (only to rodnreel.com and louisianasportsman.com). But by 2016, social media was deep-sixing many websites - and especially online forums. From an administrative standpoint, maintaining a forum was an overburdening task. And social media was so easy to use, scalable to all devices, and so powerful in handling graphics. Today only a handful of websites still have forums, most notably DanBlanton.com.
Ditching our forum became an easy decision in early 2017 when our website software suddenly became unsupported - by everybody! It's at this point I decided to ditch using any other website software and go to Blogger. Wordpress seemed a great alternative, but there are a couple things about Blogger that I find more appealing: it's reliable and it's dirt easy to use!
The sad part of losing our old website were all the great posts made in the forum by experts like Pete Cooper, Ron Begnaud, Rich Waldner, Mark Delaney, Bill Brown, Kirk Dietrich, to name a few. Of course, Ron, Kirk and others now post on Facebook and that resource will be with us for a long time (at least Zuckerberg insures us!).
Social media is great, but it will never replace a website. That's because, despite it's terrific media intergration features, sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., are poor instruments for conveying information. For example, their search engines are nothing short of disaster, and their calendar systems lack inheritancy. But most important of all, a website is a one-way communication... it doesn't allow spammers from across the globe to foul up your timeline.
I haven't decided yet on whether to throw a 30th anniversary party. If so, it'll probably be in the second half of this year. So many activities taking place between now and June. Any suggestions will be appreciated!