history

I’ll keep this part very short because really – it’s pretty boring crap. Winextra first came about somewhere around 12 to 15 years ago. It started out as a private NNTP news server made up of the rejects of the Lockergnome NNTP newsgroups which later closed down.

At some point I figured that NNTP wasn’t going to cut it anymore and decided to build a website to help promote the newsgroups and my software. What actually followed was many years of confusion and not knowing where exactly I wanted to take Winextra.

During that time I experimented with many different kinds of CMS and blogging platforms including dasBlog and DotNetNuke. I’m not sure at which point I actually settled down with the WordPress platform but according the the archives my first post as the Winextra blog was in November 2006.

I have a bad habit of getting sidetracked and unfortunately WinExtra has taken much of the brunt of my not having any real direction. The biggest distraction has been the whole social media nonsense that has totally captivated much of the Web these days.

During my time of concentrating on social media the one good thing that came out is that I found myself with an identity of sorts – that being the cranky old fart. This came about basically because I didn’t get sucked in to the hype but instead tried my best to poke holes when needed into the hot air balloon that the movement has become.

But as with all things built on the shaky foundation of hype my interest in social media became extremely tainted and tiresome. It was then that I realized that my real passion is all about finding and sharing all the cool stuff that the Web and our fascinating world has to offer.

After spending some time writing about Microsoft and Windows I realized that this was only a small part of what I wanted to do here at Winextra. So I decided that I would expand the purview of this blog to better reflect my real passion – sharing cool stuff.

It can be anything from nanobots to cool t-shirts, medical marvels to robots on Mars, if I think it is cool I want to be able to share it with you and Winextra is the place where I will do that.

The same will hold true for any writers that come to work here at Winextra – if it appeals  to their sense of cool then you will read about it here.

the who

Right now there is just myself with some occasional contributions from friends but hopefully I will be able to hire writers to help expand the coverage of cool here at Winextra.