About this Website

This website is my personal website. On this site, I will post various items, such as stories and interesting articles I have written, links to other websites I am creating or have created, and more. In other words, this is my portfolio website, where I can showcase my work.

A brief history of the website follows:

When I was younger, I was always curious to know how websites were created. I liked to play around with word processing programs imagining how my website would look. But, at that time, I did not know that a special language (HyperText Markup Language — HTML) was used to create the pages — or that I could create a site using my personal computer.

Finally, in 2005 — a few years after I had learned about programming languages and web scripting languages — I decided to buy a book on HTML to make my dream come true. I was amazed that I was able to begin creating web pages within a morning of reading the book and working examples! I decided to just make web pages for my own pleasure; I never intended to post them on the web, just because I didn’t think I had anything the world could enjoy.

That changed, however, just a year later. I knew that I enjoyed writing and I enjoyed Formula 1. So, I decided to combine my hobbies into a website. In 2006, I registered the domain names www.kyle-gottfried.com and www.kylegottfried.com, and began work on my new website. The site was quickly expanded to include information on American Football, another of my passions, and Soccer, because of the World Cup. I soon learned that having a multiple-subject website written solely in HTML would be very tricky to keep updated.

In 2007, after learning to write pages in PHP, I began to convert the website. I had my Formula 1 website working well, as well as my website covering the CFL and NFL, but I never got around to completely implementing my section on Soccer. Unfortunately, in 2008, my original web hosting provider upgraded their PHP software, which led to code incompatibilities. (Talk about a learning experience! That was when I learned to future-proof my code, to the best of my abilities.) At that time, having started college and being too busy studying to update the website, I decided to make it mainly a personal website.

Around this time, I also decided to move hosts, for financial and other reasons. I began the process of migrating web hosts during a summer break from college — I am glad I did it during summer vacation due to the amount of work involved! — and stayed with that provider for many years, until I got the crazy idea to attempt to host my own web server in 2022. (Long story short, it did not go well.) I returned to using a web hosting company in 2024, just to make my life a bit more sane!

Along with the first web server move came a small web site re-design, in an attempt to better serve my visitors. I kept the website until my most recent server move in 2024, when I tired of the website looking dated and bland. I also wanted to transition from HTML 4, which was current when I started the website but had long been surpassed by more adaptive technologies, including the new standard, HTML5. Although initially planning to undertake this change in 2020 during the pandemic, I finally sat down and completely redesigned the website in the early months of 2025.

Currently, the website only contains some articles and short stories that I have written throughout my life. However, as 2025 progresses, I plan to expand the website, adding such things as my documentation of my long-standing smart home project, a blog, and computer programming projects that I would like to start developing.

That is the history of the site. I hope you enjoy your visit.