Hi Mark and a warm welcome to you!

That's great that you have come so far in your craft that you are working with code and have several websites.  Have you built all of your websites using the same platform or have you tried building on other platforms such as vBulletin or xenForo?

I fall into the self-taught webmaster category (with a lot of help along the way though) and I'm striving to learn more about the web developer part. 

Loving what you do and learning along the way is exactly how I feel about being a webmaster, creating content, interacting with others and meeting people while sharing life stories.

Please feel free to share and promote your hobby websites on Techs anytime, as we hope that collaboratively, we can also create a group of great websites, webmasters/web developers and talent at Techs.

Thank you so much for being here at Tech's Realm!

~TD

Mark Ransome said: Hi, Well I started out about 15 years ago after reading a book about affiliate marketing, I got lured into the "get rich" scheme of things! That's when I first started dabbling about with hosting, domains and Wordpress. I have to say I've yet to make a penny and soon got disillusioned by it all, but being single I decided to try making a dating site which I still have today (I'm still single though! LOL ), but by now I was hooked on just building websites and learning the programming languages that run them, don't get me wrong, I'm no expert in any of them but I get by, and I love researching and playing around with bits of code here and there. My websites: https://www.yourperfectlovematch.com/ - Dating site. Built using Chameleon software. https://www.ifriendica.com/ - General social network. Built using Chameleon software. https://www.ovoarticles.com/ - Article website with Adsense (Yet to make any money!). Built with a cheap script from www.phpsoftpro.com. https://www.etresco.com/ - A Worpress site promoting Clickbank products (Yet to make any money!). I'm not particularly proud of this one as most products are rubbish on Clickbank, but it's there so I just leave it! https://www.specialtrustedfriends.com/ - This is my flagship website and probably the only one I feel proud to have built. It's the first one that has any real meaning and is not there to try and make money. It has a purpose! I've tried many other scripts in the past including Xenforo, Wowonder, Youzify, some I can't remember, but SE is to date by far my best choice. So, there you go, a brief history of my web developing career! Not that impressive really. Kind regards, Mark

Hi Mark, Thank you for sharing your websites. I just took a look....all very different in concept, appearance and purpose; nice. I do understand the frustration when the monetary promises do not come to pass as you hoped, however, in some way, perhaps ways you won't ever know, your websites may serve a purpose to someone and that's just the greatest reason of all to keep going for me. Your Special Trusted Friends serves that purpose and value to others, bringing meaning in their lives to chat with friends with similar challenges in life.

Wordpress, I currently use on a website and SE on the others. vBulletin yes, and almost went with xenForo as I post on several xenForo websites, but the hold-back on xF was that it's still just a forum with more tabs to me. I really like the imaging you can bring through with Inspira. I think we both started in our website adventure about the time when "forums" were loosing their favor as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter brought on their new look and quick posting method.....so what worked for so many in the late 1990's and early 2000's was no longer the benchmark when creating new websites? At least that's just my observation in looking back. In 2009 to 2012 my website then was doing fine, but by 2013, total change. I closed it. I was using vBulletin at the time, and because you get the "website bug" you want to crank out another website, so I changed the domain name, skin and purpose, but it couldn't get traction; closed again. The above websites were crushing the little guys with niche websites like mine. A few years ago I felt "called by a higher purpose" and dived into it again, this time trying something new with Social Engine. I was on the fence about creating more with Social Engine and used my old vBulletin license to create a website with vB again about eight months ago, but it wasn't long before I realized vB 5 (vBulletin Connect 5) was not what vB used to be and the premise of my website was not a good fit in a forum setting. I did close that vB website and rebuilt on SE. Now I've built five websites on SE because the Inspira theme was the "closer" argument for me to build more with SE.

Having said that I'm "all in" on SE, there are issues at times, as you noted with links and quotes above. That is not you and I've been fighting the same challenge in the last two updates. I started a "bug reporting" thread on Tech's so maybe collaboratively, we can post these bugs or wonky issues and report them to SE so they will fix before the next version.

https://www.techsrealm.com/forums/topic/14/website-issues

I'll post some of the issues I'm challenged by in the Group Discussions post editor's box too. Feel free to add anything you see not working at any time. If it's not SE code, and it's my settings, that's something I can fix. You mentioned not being able to "edit" and I will change the settings today so you can edit your posts. Thanks for sharing your experience so I can make those changes so your experience at TR is at it's optimum. I did see an issue with one of your links too, which I'll have to go back and diagnose a bit, because I noticed the link was highlighted blue and not purple (iFriendica) and that was the one that didn't open for me, but I was able to get to it outside of Techs.

*When I change the user settings to "edit" and you go back in to edit your posts, just a suggestion, you may want to save your post in Word or another document before you get started. I've found with this formatting bug in discussions, that the more you try to fix it and save the edit, the worse the post gets with issues. I built the post for the Thoreau thread at Special Trusted Friends on another website first, knowing I would likely have issues....but after getting to your forum and seeing you allowed editing I was glad to see that, which helped. So just remember to save your work in a separate place while you are editing, that way you have the original to retrieve if needed.

....and yet, I had all of my post to you created in numerous nice paragraphs, but when posted they all meshed together again.  This is indeed a SE issue, and I will report this, as well...*sigh*

I did go back and edited and aded spaces in between the paragraphs.  I could probably take away one space, but then I've been in this movie before, and if I do, it may be one space too many, and the paragraphs will be no more again.  I'm going to leave it as is right now.