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It was one year ago, Feb 28, 2006 to completely precise, that TheCodeCave.com first came on line.  A week later I had a fairly functional website, running WordPress with a theme I was satisfied with and a bunch of great ideas. 

This site was mostly meant for my own convenience as a place where I could put Delphi and PHP code fragments  that I knew I could find later.  I have used it for that again and again and again.  It is a MUCH better resource than Microsoft Outlook’s sent folder.  Plus, now that someone named Meagan works at the office, every time I simply type ME in the To: address of an email, I send stuff to her instead of my home account.  (Sorry, Meagan, for all of those meaningless code fragments in your email account.)

Anyway,  my wife first suggested the name The Code Cave.  Since I liked caving and coding, it made sense to her.  Since it had multiple meanings, I, of course loved, it.  (A code cave, you know, is empty space in an executiple where all sorts of neat treasures can be hidden.)  So it worked.  

A year later, the site has a google rank of 357,000, which is not to shabby in my book.  Especially since I had a couple dry spells of 1 post per month.  I’ve just gotten my first Adsense check deposited and that pays for next year of hosting in full.  So, the site is self sufficient.   I’ve also been told that I’ve helped loads of people (Sweet).  And my life is enriched by coming to know loads of new people I’ve met through the site.

Not a bad year…   Her sites have done well too.  She hosts KnitChat.com of course (where I’d been doing php and WordPress for a whole year before TheCodeCave. came around), and Loom Out Loud, and now  a new knitting magazine site: Loom Knitter’s Circle.

 I plan to do a number of “Posts that never made it” posts, the first one of which was the Delphi source code for turning any 1and1 account into a Dyn DNS server posted yesterday.  I had a whole series of web automation posts planned, but I never put them up.  I hope to get a number of them up. I’ve found that when I stop using this site a repository, and start using it as a blog, I get less code up here and less posts up here. So, the posts will get up here when they get up here.

So, for an old Borland Turbo Prolog/Turbo C/Turbo Pascal coder, my venture into the web has been a good experience…  And I can’t wait to tell you all some of the good stuff that I’ve got going on right now…  I’m juggling a few nifty things right now and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share as a result. I’m smilin’ just thinkin’ about it.

code monkey – noun –

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1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team. 2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer. 3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a management decision, or of complaining about having to live with such decisions. As in “Don’t ask me why we need to write a compiler in COBOL, I’m just a code monkey.”      — The Jargon File