It’s my birthday today, and to celebrate, I thought I’d post a blog about this very website, MJRyder.net, which turned 10 earlier this year. I can’t believe that a whole decade has passed since I started the project, and it’s certainly had its highs and lows, however, I’m glad to say it’s going as strong as ever, and I’m really happy with the way it’s been taking shape. Here’s to another 10 years!
Background
The MJRyder.net project started around 2008, way back when I was a bright-eyed undergraduate at Brunel University, London. I had previously left a degree programme in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College to follow my real passion, books, and found myself as a fish out of water trying to strike a balance between my love of the arts, and the technical skills that got me onto a prestigious engineering degree.
Those first few years on my English degree were tough – far tougher than I might have imagined. This wasn’t so much because of the subject matter, but rather because I found it hard to identify with my fellow students, many of whom didn’t seem to have the same passion for English literature that I had. Most of the students on the course didn’t have any prior work experience, and most were 18 years old, while I was in my early 20s, with a much better idea of who I was and where I wanted to go.
One of the biggest challenges for me was coming to terms with the feeling that I had in some way failed by giving up my place at a world-famous university to do what many would describe as an ‘easy’ degree. Of course, English is certainly not an ‘easy’ degree (if you put the effort in!), but being a working-class lad from a council estate in Ramsgate, I knew that opportunities don’t come around very often, and I really worried that Imperial College might have been my one and only shot at success.
With these feelings in mind, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to embark on an English programme, then I was going to do it ‘properly’, and seize every opportunity that came my way. It soon occurred to me that one way I could stand out was to create a website to boost my profile. To this end, I spoke to a few of my more technically-minded contacts, and acquired the domain www.mjryder.net (the others were taken) and set up a fairly basic site using the content management system MODx.
This gave me a great opportunity to learn skills as a hobbyist web developer, while also exploring new ways to present myself and raise my profile. This included a blog about my life as a student and my plans to publish an omnibus of novels, The Powers That Be. I also posted about the various articles I wrote for the student magazine, Le Nurb.[1] Around this time, I managed to get my website added to a student blogroll, which led to several opportunities from businesses looking to reach out to students. As such, I soon found myself writing book reviews for PGUK (I got free books!), as well as several sponsored blog posts on various topics relating to student life.
Finding work
During this time, I worked as an admin for a number of online forums for the video game Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. As a veteran player with a creative streak, I decided to work on a game-guide to introduce players to online competitive play. I published the early iterations of this guide on my website, which got quite a bit of traffic at the time. It also proved useful in my job hunting endeavours, as it helped me secure my first professional job, working for ChangYou.com, the publisher of MMORPG, Tian Long Ba Bu (TLBB).
As the years passed and my career progressed, I updated my website to reflect my expanding portfolio. I also spent some time working on a new web template, and migrated my website over to WordPress CMS. This was mainly for the ease of updates, and the extra exposure granted by the WordPress platform.
Calamity strikes!
Several years passed as I worked as a professional ghostwriter in the healthcare press. However, towards the end of my time at EKC, several issues came up in my personal life, and I ended up losing a lot of content as my hosting provider locked me out of my account due to unpaid bills.[2]
In the end, I had to set up a new contract with a different hosting provider and essentially re-build MJRyder.net from scratch. This was no easy task and took quite some time, however, it did give me the chance to have another look at how I present myself online.
The Lancaster years
Several years passed after the re-build, and I left Kent to move to Lancaster to start on my PhD. By this time I had built up quite a diverse portfolio of material, ranging from game guides and books to print articles, blogs, and websites at CCCU. Over time I adjusted the presentation of the site, and the layout to better reflect my career while also shifting to a lighter, responsive WordPress theme.
Winter 2018 update
Following the publication of my novel The Darkest Hour, I spend quite some time working on another website www.darkesthourbook.com, and in the process, came up with some new ideas to better reflect my work on my own portfolio website. The result is what you see today (Dec 2018), adding in a few more visuals to my website, and taking advantage of some layout plugins that help make the site look a lot more dynamic and engaging.
As with all websites, it’s still a work-in-progress as my career develops, but I have to say I feel as though I’ve reached quite a good place with MJRyder.net at present. The next steps will be to expand out the research section, and maybe add another row to the homepage as I launch a podcast in 2019.
[1] Hint: the name is Brunel spelt backwards!
[2] It’s a long story… I used to run a small web business with a business partner who had all the hosting and domains registered in his own name. Following his unexpected death, I had no way to pay the bills and no access to the servers to save not only my own website, but all the other websites we hosted. This was a very stressful time.
Impressive Mike.