tubridy.net @ 25

tubridy.net turns 25 this year. Here is a bit of the history of how it got here.

I was working at the time providing marketing support to the third-party resellers of our software product IronCAD. The IT department had set me up to publish a secure portal on our corporate website to provide them with news and information about our product. I used the now-notorious FrontPage to do the authoring.

The notorious Microsoft FrontPage. It used tables to do web layouts which fell apart once browsers improved.

I decided to look into getting my own website – whatever that meant! I checked for tubridy.com but, alas, it was unavailable already. tubridy.net however was not. At that time Yahoo was the top dog in the internet world. I set up a hosting service with them that lasted over twenty years before switching to GoDaddy a couple of years ago.

tubridy.net V1 – Built on Microsoft FrontPage

I really liked the fact that I had an email address that was essentially my name. I used FrontPage to build a site to put my photos on and share personal news.

In 2008 when I got laid off for the last time, I decided to make the web my profession. I had been doing interface design at the time and discovered a career in user experience design just waiting for me!

tubridy.net V2 – Built using Dreamweaver but not very responsive for different screen sizes

I taught myself HTML and CSS and learned how to use Adobe Dreamweaver and multimedia tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro. I rebuilt my website using Dreamweaver and built other sites to develop my skills.


Other sites


At about that time, I landed a job at a firm contracting to IBM as a User Experience Designer. Their third-party group was interested in my skills and experience in software marketing for their web group. I ended up working as a web designer for over 8 years with this group before retiring in 2018.

IBM Business Partner Portal – Text heavy and old school to start

I became interested in WordPress a couple of years into my stint with IBM. I used it to develop a website for a non-profit with the idea they could learn how to use it (they didn’t). I decided to switch my own site over around the same time. HTML coding was fine – for a while! WordPress also provided functionality it would be hard to develop on my own. This would be the third – lost – version of tubridy.net!

V3 – The lost version – no good backups 😟

I was still using Yahoo’s web hosting service which was sold in the mid-2010s to another company. At that time the quality of the hosting service really sucked and there were frequent problems. I had hoped the new company would improve but that did not materialize. It all came to a head when I lost the site in 2020 with no good backups.

I switched services and am now publishing with GoDaddy. What an improvement that was over the Yahoo crap!

V4 – The Excellent Adventure!

tubridy.net is officially in its fourth incarnation now. I have been building it out with content from the huge photo library I amassed over the years. I have published two of my Excellent Adventure trips so far and looking forward to a great trip in the spring of this year.

Author: Eddie Tubridy

Eddie ! He's Just This Guy ~ You Know?