Bill Oddie taught me how to make web sites

One of my (many) life regrets, is not being a proper website archivist. Not just of the various versions of hicks.design, but the many client sites and side projects. Even when I had backups, the CD-Rs in question have long since corrupted/refuse to be read by any computer.

In recent years, I've tried to do better. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to restore the original Rissington Podcast site. Which brings me to, Bill Oddie.

For anyone not familiar with the name, he's a British comedian and musician (I grew up watching The Goodies but is better known for being a TV naturalist and conservationist from the 80's onwards. It was his documentaries that got me into birding, and in particular, an episode of the BBC series "My Favourite Walks". It was filmed on Fair Isle, showing the islands specialties (Bonxies, Puffins etc.) and the 'red flag' system for announcing rare birds. I saw a repeat of that in 1986, and that's where it all started for me. I wish the whole programme would turn up on YouTube, but sadly only a small clip exists.

When I left my salary job at a publishers in Oxford to go freelance in January 2002, learning web design was highest on my list of priorities. Going freelance gave me the opportunity to explore digital, and aside from designing my own site (of course), I wanted something else to experiment on. In a fit of high nerdery, I created BillOddie.net, an 'unofficial fansite' to do just that. It wasn't a very serious endeavour when it started, a bit self-aware of how ridiculous it was, but it soon took over and became very serious. It did it's job though - by working on that site I transitioned away from Dreamweaver to hand writing code. I experimented with 'cgi-bin', PHP includes and 'DHTML' scripts, but more importantly, CSS.

It also coincided with an epiphany moment. I'd been given a website job to "finish" that someone else had created. The designer had made the site fluid, but the client wanted it fixed width, despite advice to the contrary. From that site I learnt CSS - how it could be separate, structured files, and how powerful the cascade was. I didn't have to repeat style rules for each element! They'd even made it very simple to be fixed width, by just uncommenting a line of code. I told the client what a good job that person had done, and that he didn't need my involvement at all (although I'm glad he did). The designer on that job was… Jeremy Keith. So this article should really be called "Bill Oddie and Adactio taught me web design".

I took what I'd learned and applied to my nerdy little fan site. That was until 2004, when I decided to pull the plug on it. Apart from hicks.design taking off, I was inundated with genuine emails who thought I was Bill Oddie. I was maybe also a little embarrassed at how serious I was taking the whole thing. I wondered how Bill would feel about it - would it come across a bit stalky? I kept thinking of that episode of I'm Alan Partridge" where he meets his obssessed superfan ("You're a mentalist!!"), I didn't want to be seen like that.

So I let the domain expire, and Andy Mabbett, who had been helping with news items, spent the time adding bibliography information from the site to Wikipedia. I've not thought much about it since, until a few weeks ago, when I found that someone had bought the old domain name and was using pages taken from the Wayback Machine to populate it - along with spam links of course. I felt a bit peeved, but as much with myself that I let it happen.

So I've restored BillOddie.net as best I can, and it's now hosted here on hicks.design. The Gallery section is missing completely, and the 'when is Bill next on TV' script no longer works, but everything else is there. I was tempted to update some parts, such as the ludicrously complex 'DHTML' script that powers the menu (which should've just been an unordered list with :hover styles for dropdown) but it's a snapshot of where I was at the time. It's a lot like an embarrassing family photo, but I'm owning it!