Welcome to the new Everything Vintage site

I want to say a big welcome to anyone who has discovered the Everything Vintage site and give a bit of background on why and how I created it.

Background to Everything Vintage

I've been running four different WordPress sites over the last few years.

The first site was a personal blog that I started one Sunday evening after I'd finished a bottle of wine, found that I could create a WordPress blog on wordpress.com for free and thought it would be a bit of a laugh to start blogging. That was in January 2009 and the first post I wrote about Unix Timestamp conversion is still available, although I doubt many people have read it!

Over the years I wrote many articles on that site which covered the range of my personal interests which are mostly photography, vintage photography and latterly electronics. During that time I moved from a wordpress.com hosted site to a self-hosted site, and the domain name has changed a couple of times as I've moved content around.

In about 2017 I had the idea of publishing some of the photos I'd found in vintage cameras I'd purchased that still had film in them. I started adding them to the blog, but after a time I thought it would be better to have a separate domain dedicated to just the photos, and so found-film.co.uk was born.

In the 6 years since I had the idea the site has developed to mostly feature 35 mm colour slides taken by unknown amateur photographers from the 1920s up to the 1990s and now has over 2000 images published.

In 2019, I further developed the found-film idea by adding a new site that did essentially the same thing but with 8 mm cine film. On that site, vintage-home-movies.co.uk, I have published about 130 vintage cine films that were mostly taken in the 1950s to 1980s which was the golden age of home movie making on cine film.

Also in 2019 I created a site dedicated to WordPress itself - or rather my experiences of developing plugins and code to WordPress to create the sites I've just described. That site was called develop-with-wordpress.co.uk.

Why I created Everything Vintage

So why did I create another WordPress site? Or more specifically, why did I move content from the four sites I've just described to a different site?

Well there were several reasons.

First the cost - with four sites I'm paying for four domain registrations and in some cases four licences for some plugins to use across four domains instead of just one (or as it happens two because I actually created two sites - Everything Vintage to host all my vintage technology content and my Personal Blog which still goes by the name Simon Hawketts' Photo Blog at the moment).

SEO - with four sites and limited time¹ each site only gets updated perhaps once a fortnight. If there is one site that means there is new content being posted more regularly, which is one of the factors that search engines use to determine the importance of a site in the search rankings.

Synergy - the content on the different vintage sites have a natural synergy which is well served by them being hosted together. For example, things like related posts work better because it's possible to see relationships between e.g. cine films and photos that were shot in the same location or at the same time etc.

So for those reasons I've created the Everything Vintage site that's going to be the home of all the vintage technology articles that I've written over the years, and also the new ones I'm planning.

The name Everything Vintage is a much better description since I'm planning to write articles on more technologies than just photography - for example, I've added reviews of several vintage radio sets and I've recently purchased a few reel to reel tape recorders which I'm going to be reviewing and adding to the site.

As mentioned above, I've also created a site for the other content - digital photography, reviews of modern equipment and personal stuff which is hosted at simon.hawketts.co.uk and if anyone is interested in the technical aspects of merging the sites to create Everything Vintage this post on my personal blog goes into some detail about how I did it.

Subscriptions to Everything Vintage.

One other thing to mention to anyone who has subscribed to this site in the past.

You may see there is a different subscription widget in the sidebar and the footer of this site. I've set that up because the subscription model that Jetpack uses, which is how I've registered subscribers since the very first version of the blog, doesn't work with different WordPress post types and most of the content on the site is actually modelled with custom post types.

Therefore if you would like to be notified when new content is added to the site², please consider subscribing using the new subscription form.

1. although I have retired now, so I have more time to devote to my hobbies [↩]
2. as opposed to just blog posts like this one [↩]