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The History of this site.
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Introduction:
It may suprise you to know that this entire site is being run by me, Ben Pickering. I am 15 years old and have had an interest in weather nearly all of my life. When I started this site nearly 2 years ago, it was setup to be for weather related data, such as my book, and live data from my weather station in Tamworth, UK. This did not happen until August 2009.
The First Bmet logo was designed in five minutes - can you tell?
On the 25th April 2008, I was playing some games at school on a site called www.lineskygtr34.talkspot.com. I soon noticed the, "Create a website for free!", advert, which I would soon be trying to hide from everyone at school. This directed me to www.TalkSpot.com, the whole network behind this site. It allows you to have a website for free, with the only limit being the number of pages. You add stuff to your site through menu's, and its all very easy to use. Soon after I started telling people at school about my site, people were requesting games to the site. I naturally agreed, and immediately after, I.C.T lessons were full of people on my site. Some of the games included Nball, N, Miniclip games, and Air Hockey. The site only had 5 pages. For the first month my site was number 3 on the most popular TalkSpot sites.
The second image was created shortly after, after a few complaints about the previous logo.
About a month later, in May 2008, my site was filtered by the school software. After talks with the network administrator, an agreement was made to unfilter the website, only if Nball was removed. This was done two weeks later, and by the time it had been unfiltered, all interest had been lost. It was time for premium content.
The third logo incorporated new colours, and would be the basis for the "pay" websites logo.
Later on that month, I decided to upgrade and pay for my website. This gave me as many pages as I wanted, and also my own domain name. www.bmet.com was already taken (I advise you not to click on that link, but if your curious...), so I decided to go with www.bspmet.com. The reason for this: well, Bmet was supposed to stand for Ben Meteorology??? Yeah. So I figured BSPmet, was the obvious step to take, as BSP are my initials. It also gave me email accounts and it was just generally better all around. TalkSpot have been and still are great, especially at customer support. I highly recommend them to anyone. I am paying $7 (£5ish) a month, but I'll probably change that to $35 a year soon.
The Bmet Pay part of the site contained additional content and this logo change was not made until 3 months later.
Then, to cover the costs of the site, and to generate more interest, I added premium content. It cost £5, and you got it forever. Later this changed to £5 per year. As it was at my school it was done cash in hand, and so I made very little (I think it was like £20...),and advertisements popped up on the free site. Then everything changed.
The new system involved three types of site: free, £3 per year, and £5 per year.
The new system supported PayPal payments, and the Silver and Gold sites were hosted for free on other TalkSpot websites. The Silver site was never completed, and the Gold (The PORTAL and Gold were the same site, it was just to go along with the Bronze and Silver pictures on the home page) still exists, but some content was removed, for reasons I shall explain below.
The PORTAL changed everything.
The PORTAL was basically the Gold site, but I thought the logo looked much cooler. The site was red and black, and was pretty cool, well, I thought so.
It had loads of stuff, but attracted no new customers. And I think only one previous customer used it. This was because they were having second thoughts about using the site at school (which was the whole point). At the time of The PORTAL, I was causing a lot of problems at school by hacking with the system. This is something that I am not proud of, but admit that I did and have now changed my ways. You need to know that, because its how the story goes. At the same time I created a website specifically for bypassing school filters and helping others to do so. THIS WAS WRONG AND I DO NOT ENCOURAGE ANYONE TO DO THIS. SCHOOL AND WORK FILTERS ARE THERE FOR A REASON. TO PROTECT YOU. Enough said I think.
The "Filter Me UK" Website has been deleted.
Now I was getting into deep trouble at school. www.bspmet.com had been filtered, and I had my account removed. Let this story be a lesson to everyone who is attempting to bypass school systems - don't. It was July 2009, and the summer holiday was about to begin. On the Tuesday before we broke up I had my final meeting with the Headteacher, and with the I.T department, and over the summer I was instructed to come up with idea's for a new school website. In September I was to have my account back with restricted access and only 100MB of space. This is all behind me now, and I realize what I did was wrong, and am encouraging others at my school to stop.
Things began to look positive again in August 2009, with the new site:
For my 15th birthday I received a camcorder which could do time lapses. This got me interested again, and my YouTube page was soon full of time lapse video's. This gave me the idea to delete all of the games off my site, and in fact delete my site completely, including "Filter Me UK", Silver, Bmet Pay, Bronze, Gold, And The free Bmet site. The PORTAL remains, but is locked to all users, and all users have been deleted, so only I can access it. Also, I have deleted most of The PORTAL anyway, so I only use it now for online storage. Then I started again on www.bspmet.com, turning it into what it should have been all along - a weather related site.
B.S.Pickering,
26 August 2009
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