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Mac OS X Hints turns 14

Fourteen years ago today, I launched Mac OS X Hints, with this simple post. The Mac OS X 10.0 Public Beta was only a couple months old, and many Mac users (myself included) were feeling lost in the land of Unix and Terminal. (Despite anything Apple said at the time, Terminal was very much a required aspect of using Mac OS X in those early days!)

Related post: RIP Mac OS X Hints, Nov 4 2000 - Nov 4 2014

At the time of launch, I knew nothing about content management systems or PHP; I knew enough HTML to be dangerous, and very little about anything else—including design, as you can see from the image at right.

That image, courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, was taken one month after launch. Could it be any brighter and uglier? Probably not. While I did many things wrong during that launch, I did get a few things right…

  • The site was all about the community; it was my intent from day one that it would be a users helping users site, not a "me telling the world what to do" site.
  • The content management system I chose, Geeklog, has proven to be very long lived—fourteen years on, and it's still what powers the site. In all that time, we had (I believe) exactly one hacking incident. Not bad.
  • The site had a laser focus on hints; I'd do a pick of the week, but outside of that, it was all about the hints.

So despite my poor design and lack of PHP skills, the site flourished. So much so that Macworld purchased the site and hired me in June of 2005. I spent nearly five years with Macworld, before leaving in 2010 to join Many Tricks.

In looking back, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the site would flourish to the point where it would actually change my career. But it did, and for that, I'm eternally thankful to everyone who helped make macosxhints.com what it was. So happy birthday, Mac OS X Hints!