Evolution:
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Since about 1981 as a young kid living in Dublin, Ireland, I've been messing about with computers, starting with the 1KB black & white soundless Sinclair ZX81 (I did eventually figure out a way to bully it into making sounds..), later getting a 16KB expansion pack so I could play flight sim's as well as scramble :) (we all wrote programs so efficiently in those early days, try to fit one worddoc in 1KB.....), moving up to the Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CP/M PCW,and through various other early computers to this age of Wintel computers (which I hope is ending soon).

Back then the only online services outside university were the likes of prestel and other dialup bbs's and anyway, Irish telephone bills are insane so my online presence was minimal until I got decent access while doing Chemistry & Experimental Physics in university.

Back in 1995 I wrote a reasonably popular homepage which peaked at about 800 hits daily, and provided useful information on where to get various free resources online for people making up homepages. In early 1997 I added the ability to send basic electronic postcards from the site using live radio also, however due to commitments elsewhere, I never really put much work into it, and the site continued life without much maintenance eventually becoming totally out of date. In autumn 1998 I finally logged on and put it out of it's misery by deleting it, a Spanish translation of it a friend made however still remains online to this day (without ecards) http://www.arrakis.es/~melgar/gratis.

Beginnings:
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In the second week of may 1999 I decided to write a new improved electronic postcard system that instead of having low-quality midi tunes with the cards, had live radio like I had done back in early 1997. This was now becoming much easier to do as the market penetration of the free and required realaudio plugin was pushing towards 100 million, so a decent percentage of surfers would already have the plugin, and it was distributed with both Microsoft's alleged browser and Netscape as an optional installation extra.

In mid-may, I tested my system publicly at an obscure internet address and it proved very popular, within the week I had generated a loyal following, and it was clear that I had hit on an original idea that made the system stand out from the many Electronic Postcard systems online. People constantly sent themselves and friends cards to listen to the radio online with the excellent realplayer g2 plugin that my site invoked.

After the first week on-line, I decided that the concept was so popular, I registered the Domain name, Radiocards.Net, and arranged for it to be professionally hosted from Seattle in the US as most of the traffic was from the US.

Early Days:
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At the end of may 1999, I launched this current site at www.radiocards.net and within 2 days traffic was in the many thousands, so I decided, the project was so popular that maybe I could make money from it. At this stage I got myself some sponsors who ran adverts and Radiocards.Net started generating revenue. By mid-June, I got bored with trying to promote it and decided to find a way for to make it even more self-promoting, so I decided to write a system where webmasters, big and small could add a Electronic postcard system to their own websites without needing any technical expertise or access to a cgi-bin, this meant that as they were busy promoting their own sites, and using a highly customised version of radiocards, they were in effect promoting more traffic for the Radiocards Network as it was becoming. Suddenly my traffic started climbing through the roof, Radiocards in it's first 8 weeks recorded over 1,500,000 page views (now vastly higher).

Radiocards has been mentioned and lauded on many sites all over the web up to and including a recommendation from ZDNet Online Publications, a Polish TV station, and radio stations from Barcelona to Dallas, London to Warsaw, Irish and international print media, ezines. Radiocards has also worked with various such organisations to provide them their own branded version of Radiocards, such as TodayFM, a nationwide (Ireland (ex. the missing bit in the north)) station.

Cross compatibility, Flash, Shockwave and other wonders:
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One of my principle goals with Radiocards.Net was to author something that looked and acted exactly the same in most browsers, not a mean feat these days, without using some cop-out of bouncing different browsers to different places, so whilst I could have easily spun some dynamic wonder, or shocked masterpiece, not many people would appreciate it, as it is I've used just a little dHTML, enough to enhance it, but not enough to knock out v3 browsers. I've thought a lot about using some beautiful flash 'n' shockwave, but I'm still holding off 'till more people have the Flash v4 plugin, which is not in most v4 browsers automatically.

Once I see a fair amount of my visitors with a v4 flash plugin, I'm planning to go that way with Radiocards, at least on a trial basis. Flash v4 offers some wonderful form input features, which are vital to Radiocards.Net, and Flash v3 just doesn't give the features and power needed to make Radiocards work well. All in all I like cross-compatibilty in a site, despite my dislike for a certain browser, but flash tempts me, have a look at my all time favourite site, www.megacar.com to see why. This is where someday I'd like Radiocards.Net to be, just waiting for everyone to have a bit more bandwidth and better browsers.

The Explosion:
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Radiocards.Net exploded in popularity coming up to Halloween '99, when I wrote a halloween special. Hits (How Idiots Total Success) reached huge levels, as did returns which is what matters.

Following the hallo'een rush, I decided to cash in on Christmas, and wrote a new site, using flash, which I'd wanted to do for ages. Blunt! Ecards, the new site operated on a different idea, which isn't relevant here. Blunt is closed now and on hold until next christmas as due to time constraints I have been unable to work on it as much as I'd like.

Also for Christmas, I did a new section for Radiocards, which broke all my records, with millions of hits each day in the last few days before Christmas '99, as people rushed to send eCards for the festive season.

St. Valentine's Day 2000 has now set newer, greater records!

St. Patrick's Day 2000 recorded a server breaking 1.6 million unique users - with the server falling over all day!

What makes it all tick:
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In summary, what makes Radiocards.Net tick is about 3500 pages of html (seriously!) (not counting the cards, miles of Perl, the Practically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, as it's fondly known as, and a huge amount of ssi/shtml. The whole show ran on a BSDI Unix box, (Berkeley Software Design, Inc.), using Apache/1.3.6 to serve up the fare. (It's on Apache 2 on RHEL as of May 2006).

What pays for it all to tick:
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What started as a home page, turned into a fully fledged business, Radiocards.Net was earning revenues through selling of advertising, and various affiliate programs. I was represented by BurstMedia for both run of category, and special campaigns, but moved away to multiple agencies, both run of category, and special campaign.

My advertisers have included: Forbes, The Washington Post, MTV, Dell, Gateway, ZDNet, Sun Microsystems, Rocketlinks and many more. I also have had various commission based arrangements.

I NO LONGER ACCEPT ADVERTISING.

I'd rather not mention figures, but Radiocards.Net certainly became a serious success story for me.

In it's day, Radiocards was light years ahead of the rest - a sister site I also did beat Hallmark & Amazon by many many years to the concept of cards/messages with sender selected gift buying links - "Blunt Ecards" - and it certainly was. Maybe someday I'll have a word with a lawyer about some improperily issued patents due to my prior art..... WATCH OUT HALLMARK - PRIOR ART :-)

RADIOCARDS IS NOW RUNNING IN NON-COMMERCIAL "CHARITY" MODE WITH INFREQUENT UPDATES - A QUASI-FUNCTIONAL MUSEUM OF TIMES PAST.

As one of the world's first card sites and THE WORLDS FIRST STREAMED MULTIMEDIA CARD SITE, maybe some day I'll have another original idea for it and revamp it?

*The best day was St. Patrick's Day 2000 recorded a server breaking 1.6 million unique users, though this site broke a million a good few times in the 90's*

Thanks for your interest in Radiocards.Net

Cian