debiantutorials.org started as my rekindling of the madcarters domain name. I was using it for a few years some years ago for various and sundry web sites but I took it down for a year 'cos I wasn't really interested in the sites I was using it for.

I have been using Linux for a bunch of years and found Debian right before Sarge, sometime in late 2004, I think. Wow! is what I thought about Debian and Wow! is what I still think about it. Man, this operating system RULES! I thought. But Woody was kind of a pain in the ass to set up and run. No worries, I am a true "hacker" personality. By this I mean that I like to explore a thing. Take it apart, see how it ticks....all that. This being my personality I found it pretty easy to run Woody - and Sarge came out shortly after this anyway. Sarge was so simple, but not so for everybody.

I enjoyed telling people about Debian but it was a chore supporting the systems of my courageous friends. I began to search for web sites that focused on Linux tutorials and I found some terrific ones. Then I focused on Debian and was coming up short. There didn't seem to be many decent Debian tutorial sites out there. Oh, sure, there were some quality sites dedicated to this, but they were few and far between.

Along came April 2005. I decided that I would rekindle madcarters and use the domain to host a Debian tutorial site. I thought, hey, man - I'm a regular guy, I can talk to regular people. Sheesh. Right?

May 2005 saw madcarters.com go live as a Debian GNU/Linux tutorial web site. It took a while, but within a couple months traffic started to pick up and there ya go. A Debian tutorial site focused on being simple and assisting those users of Windows in the migration to Linux. Woohoo! We were off....But continuung with madcarters.com was not at all what I wanted to do. About August of '05 I changed the domain name to madcarters.org. Being that my site was an open informational site not selling a thing or making money in any way, I thought it best to represent my work as a .org. Still, the plan was to capatilize on the name recognition of madcarters for only so long. I knew that Google and other sites still had old cache's of what madcarters used to be and the trade off for name recognition was waiting and working to get madcarters refocused not as a hemp site but as a Debian site -- a Linux site helping out.

Slowly but surely, through my complete lack of whoring the site out, this began to happen. I watched hits to the site refocus on the tutorial stuff. Happy Happy, Joy Joy. Sure, I do things the hard way -- but it always works out. Patience, says Achyra, patience.

The site really started taking off. There were plenty of references in forums and blogs web-wide and it started to look as if I was doing something right. Phew! But the plan was to allow the site to become a thing of its own. I knew that I had to change the name and "rebrand" it, so to speak. Now, what should I call it.....?

June of 2006 saw the rebirth of the site as its own entity. Completely new unto the world. debiantutorials.org was born and hosted. This is gonna be the stuff, I thought (hoped). The name was chosen, well, because that's what the site was -- Debian tutorials. All Debian. I put it out at a time when other Linux distributions were really making waves -- but it didn't matter to me, or apparently, my visitors. Those in the know choose Debian. It stands on its own as the Linux distribution of choice for reasons that you will discover poste-haste when you run it for a while.

Today, as I write this article, debiantutorials.org has been its own web entity for 9 months. It's not the biggest site of its kind, nor the best, but it gets attention. It is what it is; a very simple, basic tutorial site helping Windows users gain back some computing autonomy. It's helping those that want it to get their machines back -- to do as they please with them. To actually compute as intended.

A partner site in the form of a web forum was built to supplement my sometimes hard to understand tutorials in January of 2007. Boy, that was a chore. Because debiantutorials.org is built on Joomla, I wanted to take advantage of SMF and a commonly used "bridge" to link the 2 scripts together. That didn't go so well. Errors abounded and it was tedious. I'm not saying that the developers of these respective scripts have failed -- I'm just saying that this solution was wrong for me and where I wanted my site(s) to be. I tried some other forum scripts and they were fine in their way, but I wanted the functionality of SMF - and the price was right.

During the course of January and February of 2007 I finally settled on sticking with SMF as the forum script, but allowing it to completely stand on its own. No Joomla integration. It was a bumpy ride, that's for sure - but in March everything finally settled down, I picked an attractive template and let the site alone. Google loves it and the way that the script is built -- Talkin' it up @ debiantutorials.org is "kicking-ass" in the search engine game. That's cool. One doesn't want to build a thing and then set it out there only to be ignored.

Well, that's it. The evolution of debiantutorials.org. I hope to expand the tutorial site to include advanced topics and maybe even whore myself out. I've been building and supprting Linux systems for years now and a good friend of mine has convinced me to take my Linux "skills" to market. Maybe he's right. Surely, the small business owners and SOHO market can beefit from the scalability, security, robustness, et al that running Debian system wide can bring to them. Look for the next evolutionary step to include this as "Purchased Services" grows from the site. Maybe on debiantutorials.org proper, maybe on a "sister site". I dunno yet.

Thanks for taking the time to read this short article -- I hope I wasn't too caught up in myself or the site, it's just a thing after all. As always, I welcome your comments, opinions, insight, and direction with respect to the site. It's for you anyway, so don't be shy.

--machiner (Brian) 22 march 2007   forum post

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