The History

Back in the day

Back in late 1999 i was at Leciester uni. I had broken up with my girlfriend Helen and needed something to fill the void. Being a student, i didn't have a disposable income to spend on prostitutes or cinema tickets so i decided to design a music website in the hopes that i could take advantage of the burgeoning on-line music scene. I figured that if i could become famous on the net, then the groupies would flock to my dorm and i could just lie back and let them do all the work. humfSuckSlobbrGluckHlughSmackGulp.

From Music to Mayhem

Sadly, i discovered two things: I was crap at writing electro music, and there was no connection to the internet from my room. Although we had a phone-line, NTL had deliberately scrambled the signal to prevent students from downloading pornography and movie clips onto their modems. Athough this taught me an important lesson about not trying to do something if something else stands in your way, it also taught me how to code better websites. A couple of years later, i had even more experience after doing web design for my degree and was now working at a local clothing company as a graphic designer. I even had purchased one of the early digital cameras. One lazy evening i was figuring out how to stay in touch in with my housemates after they graduated (they were all a year younger than me). Quite why i wanted to keep in contact with them is still a mystery to me - Paul was a dirty punk, Mark was a no-good hoodie-clad bmxer, Alex's "Sath-East Landahn" tendencies could only spell disaster in the long term and Richie was an accident just waiting to happen . Still, they were the only near-decent friends i had lived with and there were no social websites at that time that were anything like the MyBook/FaceSpace ones that we have today.

Think of a name

So in 2001 i decided to knock up a flash site using the basic skills i had taught myself at uni. It was a static website hosted by a company called Pair and was originally going to be caled "BrainSpill" (after the odd webpage i used to send to Josh). Then i decided that BrainSpill was perhaps a little too "in your face" for the 21-year old demographic and thought about other names. As i was crashed out on my second-hand futon, feeling the buttons of the mattress digging into my kidneys, i wondered what the exact opposite of life in Leicester was. I got thinking about relaxing landscapes and serenity and all of a sudden it dawned on me that beaches are a great place to have fun. Few people are miserable on a tropical beach (unlike, say, Portsmouth seafront which is just plain depressing). I added the word "Vanilla" because it clarified the image and found i liked it aside from conjuring pleasant imagery, "Vanilla Beach" was easy to spell and incapable of mispronunciation. It was also URL safe (unlike, say "Pen Island" as in www.penisland.net) which was an added bonus. And, above all, it was available as a domain.

Change of tack

The first Vanilla Beach was born as nothing more than a glorified flash application with links to some blogs and photos. It was good, but not really what i was looking for. You couldn't upload new journals or add photos on the fly. It just kinda sat there. Still, it was received well by my immediate circle of friends and i had taught myself a bit of java at uni which i figured could be used to create a more dynamic site. By then i had quit my job in Leicester and had left my uni circle of friends behind in pursuit of a job in London.


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