In the 10 years Greg and I have been working on Mightor Industries, as well as other projects, this has always been a collaborative effort, neither making wholesale changes without the other’s input. The following is probably the most detailed history of MI to date (more detailed than the copy currently in the forum) and the story could not have been told without doing what Greg and I do best, collaborating to find the best solution. – Tim
Before the moniker “Mightor Industries” existed or was even a thought, there was always a passion for technology and the desire to spread the information gained through trial and error, long hours, and finally finding solutions to problems. Greg and I have been doing this for quite awhile and have always enjoyed (for the most part, except for the many times we’ve had to reformat because of either a bug or our own stupidity) the technology world. We wont bore you with all of the details about how Greg and I became friends or the fact that Greg called me one day asking about running Scandisk because he screwed something up on his Dad’s computer. We’ll mostly focus on how Mightor Industries came to be and where we’re going.
The Past – Pre 2002
My own discovery of the creation of web pages happened back in the late 90′s (1997-1998) while sitting in my Spreadsheet and Databases class in high school. I was already ahead of most of the students in the class and needed something to keep me busy. I soon discovered Geocities and created my first site. I had mentioned to Greg about Geocities and thus it had begun (Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! in 1999 and closed down to the US in 2009). We didn’t know much about HTML and the alternatives to HTML were WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors with a lot of predefined options for creating your site. All of this predates the more complex web design that is done today, interfacing with databases and content management systems wasn’t even designed yet (at least, not in mainstream).
Greg’s introduction to/history on building websites: “It was the summer of 1996 – the Olympics in Atlanta were in full swing; movies, such as ‘The Frightners’, using state of the art CGI, were opening in theaters around the country; and the dread of becoming a high school freshman was looming over my head. Something else also happened that summer – the birth of ‘Mightor’s Page’.”
“I was shown the existence of Geocities, and was told that I could make my very own webpage. Well, let us say that I was very interested, so I created my account, and set-up my first webpage. Back then, it was simple – a blue background, black text, and a skull-and-crossbones image for a banner. The page was titled, and I was done. I was like a kid at Christmas, as I now had my own webpage – oh the possibilities; I could leave my own footprint on the World Wide Web. Well, I eventually went back to school, lost all that steam I had, and the site sat, with no content, for almost a year. That changed though, when in the spring of 1997, I bought my first computer (an AMD K5 PR-133). I was heavy into playing the DOOM series of games, and after a lot of research, I started developing mods for the games. My website became the perfect place for me to share those mods. Something kept bugging me about the page though, and it had to do with the fact that the page had no design to it. It was plain and simple, and I was kind of tired of it.”
“As the year progressed, my interest in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog (games, comics, animations) began growing again, and I decided I wanted to make my own page dedicated to all things Sonic. The only problem was, I knew nothing about HTML code. Almost every night I sat my butt down in front of my computer, and I would visit a lot of different webpages, and save their source code locally. After having a large collection of examples, I loaded up Notepad and began experimenting. After a few months, I finally had a page ready and uploaded to Geocities – ‘Sonic’s Triple Spin Page’ in January of 1998. All was smooth until the end of the month when Geocities was developing all kinds of problems (site downtimes and login issues). Fed up, I took money I had been saving up, and purchased space at my first hosting company on March 16, 1998, and that is when I created ‘Mightor Publications’ (a more detailed history will be written and posted over at MP once it is finished).”
I dabbled a bit off and on, maintaining my page and doing a bit of HTML here and there. It wasn’t until around 2001 that I decided to get serious about it again and created Guernsey Computer Solutions. This site was a very early descendent of Mightor Industries, in that it focused completely on tech support and computer issues. Most of the information on this site was related to disabling automatic sharing of data with file sharing programs like Bearshare, Napster, etc. I had done a project shortly before that which required me to essentially “kill” a PC. The task: load as many file sharing programs on a freshly built computer and see how long it takes before it freezes up. After about 10-15 programs, it froze. I reloaded (re-imaged) and tried it again, turning the sharing off. The amount of network traffic alone reduced at least by 50% and the PC was a lot happier, although it never ran right with all of those programs. I do recall that summer working on the site, not having a laptop to do any work on, so I would hand write ideas and actually hand write code on paper, napkins, whatever I could find as ideas hit me.
The Birth of Mightor Industries, Inc. – July 2002
By this time, Mightor Publications was still going strong and I was still developing GCS, adding tons of content. Greg and another member of the site (DRAYMAC) also had a site, Smakk Studios, that was dedicated to original, comedic videos. The site is still in existence today, but is not much more than a splash page with DRAYMAC and J_E_R_O_M_E (another member of the site) editing a video at the radio station. With all of these sites essentially surrounded by a common theme of computers and technology, we had the bright idea of creating a parent company, that would essentially “oversee” the sub companies and would be the landing platform for all three sites. This event occurred at the AMA (Anime Mid-Atlantic) convention – in Richmond, VA – that summer (by the way, that was a VERY entertaining weekend). Once we got home from the convention, we started looking into what it would take to get a domain name with Mightor Industries in it. We finally found a host and purchased the domain. I remember the host being a halfway decent deal compared to other hosting (which was rare at the time, unless you wanted to pay a hefty price for it). It wasn’t cheap but we decided to do it anyway. Mightorindustries.net was born. We went live with the site in August of 2002.
The designs were pretty rudimentary but basically, we had a splash page with all of the sub sites linked. The sub sites then became sub domains of the site. We worked on our own stuff and Mightor Industries was nothing more than a splash page with a few links.
Greg: “During this time, each of the main sub-sections of MI were being maintained by their respective owners, with updates coming every now and then. I was constantly working with MP on an almost weekly basis during the 2002 – 2003 years. I was playing with new designs and layouts all the time; had sections of the site come and go. I was really trying to work with the site, and get it to fit my art needs, but the problem was that I was spending so much time on the design, that when it came to content, I was too burnt out to add anything. That eventually led me to just stopping maintaining updates (and even caring) about MP. This was just another issue, in addition to everything else, that piled on, as Tim explains in the next paragraph.”
In 2003, when it came time to renew, we opted not to renew our hosting, for several reasons. The two main reasons were that we were having an incredibly hard time keeping up with other commitments. Greg and I were both in school and didn’t really have a lot of time to dedicate to a hobby project. We also came to find out that the hosting provider we were with at the time was being purchased by another company and significantly limiting our resources, but maintaining the price on the resources we were receiving. It didn’t seem worth it to us to keep everything and since we weren’t working on it anyway, it seemed like a good decision to just let it go.
Things remained pretty stagnant over the next couple of years. With Greg still in school and me graduating, getting a real job and really finding out how much of a workaholic I really am, there just wasn’t enough time. We dabbled here and there and did some things but never put a thought into Mightor Industries (at least, not a serious thought).
Re-birth – January 2006
Greg and I usually get together around the holidays and I believe the subject of resurgence of Mightor Industries came up and decided to see if the domain was still available and how much hosting would be. Fortunately, the domain WAS still available and hosting was fairly inexpensive ($50/year) through GoDaddy (by the way, Greg and I are both fully aware of the reputation of GoDaddy and how they are viewed in the tech community. We’ve had no issues thus far, though). We decided to go ahead and pull the trigger and we now had the facility to bring Mightor Industries back online.
We decided to maintain the splash page and our sub domains were recreated. We also decided to implement a site wide community forum using the Simple Machines Forum software. We created a few boards and invited some of our friends to join in the discussions (Those posts are still listed in the current forum, if you’re interested). Time and motivation was still an issue and things started to die off again. However, we made a decision in 2006 not to give up the domain, even if we lost the hosting, we wouldn’t give up the domain. Fortunately, we’ve been able to maintain the hosting.
We went through several development phases from 2006 onward. Greg and I had several conversations about how to make best use of a database (the discussion really never went much beyond that, until CMS software became popular). Thus started our development processes within Mightor Industries. (See ‘For Want of a CMS‘)
The “update tool,” as Greg and I often refer to it, was the first of our home brew projects. It was very rudimentary. The front end pages for MI, MP, and MT (which was the successor for GCS) were designed to read from the database and pick up data for each site, based on entry. The back end was designed so that anyone could update the pages (including anyone who was crafty enough to pick up on the URL). It gave you a title, author, site drop down and site text. This was not an overly complex tool and really gave us a lot of insight on how to interact with HTML, PHP and MySQL.
After that, I decided to experiment with a couple of different CMS solutions, because I just wasn’t happy with the update tool and thought we could do a lot more. I was right about being able to do a lot more but way wrong about what I had found. I used Joomla for awhile and while its a great solution, it wasn’t the solution that fit us and really was quite difficult to administer. Drupal was very much the same. I had heard of WordPress, but at the time, WordPress was touted as blogging software and I didn’t really consider Mightor Industries to be a “blog”, so I ignored it completely.
I decided to take another stab at a home brew solution and started to develop MightorCMS. This would be the CMS that would ideally run all of the MI sites and be able to tie them all together (essentially some of the things that WordPress MU could do). It was a good coding experience, but in September 2008, I ceased development. I was super busy at the time and didn’t really have time to continue development. I had a halfway decent back end semi-working.
MightorCMS had as part of its specification the workings of a standard CMS: the ability to create categories and subcategories, to create posts and enter in details about the site. You could link to static pages or to content within the CMS. Some of the more unique features at the time were to be able to customize both the front and back ends with themes, as well as to see a log of all major actions that occurred (setting changes, creation of new data, editing of existing data, etc). The navigation system was also pretty similar to today’s standards, with the ability to link to all different kinds of content, both internal and external to the site running the CMS. Again, the primary focus of the CMS was on the design and while concentrating on building a CMS solution from scratch, the content of the MI site was suffering (non-existent is probably a better term to use).
As had been our problem previously, time and motivation became an issue. We continued hosting the site but made very few updates. Every once in awhile, Greg or myself would do something, but it was so minute and neither one of us were really paying attention, except when it came time to renew the domain or the hosting. Stagnation had set in.
Reintroduction – April 2011
Greg and I decided that we wanted to take a serious look at existing CMS solutions. Greg had mentioned that he was considering WordPress for his site and had been playing with it some. I decided to look into WordPress as well and was incredibly impressed with how easy it was to get a site up and running. While its primary target is for blogging, it can also be used to generate all kinds of content. What appealed to me was the ability to build your own theme. Knowing I didn’t have a lot of time, I decided to see if there was a minimal theme that I could customize myself. In April 2011, the WordPress version of Mightor Industries was introduced.
The development, as I mentioned above, was mostly in relation to the theme. We found a theme that we liked and then tweaked the hell out of it, adding in our own images and font styles, as well as adding additional information to posts, such as the ability for users to link our posts to their favorite social network and to see what time the post was written (if we decided to post multiple times a day, this would be important). One of the other things we discovered about WordPress is that if the functionality isn’t there, there’s probably a plugin to add the functionality.
The main goal of going to any CMS for us was to tie our forum into it, so that users would be able to log in from the front pages and then be able to post in the forum using that same log in and password, without having to key it in a second time. I did NOT want to have to maintain two user registrations and didn’t want my users to have to do the same. I started looking into ways to bridge WordPress and SMF together but found very little that appealed to me. The concept was just too complex. I then started searching for forum solutions for WordPress and came across Simple:Press. This plugin added the functionality we needed: to fully integrate the forum with the site. SMF is great forum software and has great functionality. Administering the forum was really simple and powerful at the same time. I didn’t really want to give it up. After evaluating Simple:Press for a short period of time, I decided to give it a go. I had one basic requirement in mind, other than being able to integrate with WordPress: to be able to convert our data from SMF to Simple:Press. This is where support forums really come in handy. I started searching through the Simple:Press support forum and found that they had developed an import plugin that would bring over the majority of our SMF data, including the different boards and all of our posts, as well as the user accounts. The fact that we could bring over our data and administer the forum pretty much in the same fashion, as well as add new functionality was a huge win. We now had the forum integrated into the main site, although there was still some theme work to be done.
Greg finally took his site to WordPress as well and started updating again. He also created another site for his photography and art, called 3-0 Studios. I made a decision regarding Mightor Technologies and retired the site. I wanted all of my efforts to be integrated into Mightor Industries, since MI was always a computer technology site.
We made an effort to start posting more. However, we hit another road block with time. I was incredibly swamped and so was Greg. We went stagnant again.
When Greg and I got together for New Years this year, we talked about a redesign of the theme and adding content to MI’s site. As a result of this new found motivation, we’ve also added many additional functions to the site. We now have a working RSS feed, as well as including social networking into our site plans (See the Contact Us section in the sidebar). As you can see, we’ve taken that pretty seriously and since the first of the year, we’ve been posting pretty much every day. Our goal is to post at least once a day, with detailed posts whenever possible about the latest happenings and ways to solve common (and not so common) issues. Our social networks are also very active, posting news stories and tips that do not typically appear on the website.
It seems like it was just yesterday when Greg and I came up with the concept of Mightor Industries. 10 years later, it feels like a new beginning, with a clean slate to make MI what we always thought it should be: a site with a strong focus on computer technology, including concise and detailed information that appeals to the masses (not just the novice or the tech savvy), as well as thoughtful and even entertaining commentary about the technology world, old and new. Now, off to do 10 more, hopefully more productive and less “more info later” posts.
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