10 Year Anniversary

May 14, 2009 — by Per Christensson

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Sharpened.net. What began as a small computer glossary back in 1999 has slowly grown into the full computer and Internet resource you see today. Besides a Glossary, Sharpened.net now includes a Help Center, a collection of Resources, and a Reviews section. You can learn more about how Sharpened.net has evolved over the past ten years by viewing the History of Sharpened.net.

I originally developed the website using GoLive Cyberstudio, which later became Adobe GoLive. Each page was developed using standard HTML, which I soon found would not be sufficient for the rapidly growing site. Therefore, after about two years, I rebuilt the Glossary section using PHP and a MySQL database. This allowed me to add definitions without creating new pages for each one, which was a huge timesaver. In the following years, I also migrated the Help Center, File Extensions, Acronyms, and Emoticons sections to the database.

For the first couple of years, the Sharpened.net database only included a few hundred entries. But as the site grew, so did the traffic. Therefore, I began updating the site much more frequently, adding new content almost every day. Now, after ten years, the database contains over 7,000 records, including computer definitions, acronyms, emoticons, file extensions, updates, and other information. While it has been a lot of work, the Sharpened.net visitors also deserve credit, since most of the entries have been from your suggestions!

Since day one, my goal has been to create a useful, easy-to-use computer and Internet resource. That means I have strived to design the site for visitors, not for search engines or advertisers. Though Sharpened.net has gone through many changes during the past decade, I have done my best to stay true to that commitment. After all, without visitors, there would be no point in building the website, let alone maintaining it everyday. =)

So thank you for ten great years. I look forward to many more decades of sharpening your knowledge of computers and the Internet.