My first exposure to computers was in first year uni in 1973 – in Electrical Engineering classes, followed by second year uni Chemistry classes – Forgo and Fortran in 1974. More computing followed in Metallurgy classes over 1975 – 1977. Later, I began studying for a second degree in IT where I learned Pascal and C++.
In the early 1990’s, I participated in some Bulletin Boards, precursors of Email. Our daughter’s 1994 birth was even announced on one of these Bulletin Boards.
Back in 1996, the internet was just kicking off – and we organised an email account with Starway that became Hotkey.
It was possible to create a Home page at Starway, and then it moved onto being at Hotkey, though it was fairly limited.
My husband had a work colleague who was using Angelfire.com, and so I set up my Angelfire.com account, a WYSIWYG site (What You See is What You Get) – with a Hokey homepage backed up with content at Angelfire.com. And then Hotkey closed, so I migrated my home page to Angelfire.com.
Essentially, you would write your website in HTML code, with tags, in Notepad/Wordpad files, saved them, and then copy pasted them into your WYSIWYG site – that meant you had backups. But it was still in the era of dial up access to the internet, before Broadband and mobile wifi appeared.
From about 2006, I began to manage some Intranet sites in Port Kembla Steelworks, before they were migrated to Sharepoint. And then I also managed some Sharepoint sites, I even established some Sharepoint Wikis. I also used Freelance and Frontpage around that time. Plus we also had SAP, Excel, Powerpoint, Access. And of course the photo editing sites were taking off, as was Microsoft Publisher.
I continued to post at the family’s Angelfire.com sites until 2008, and utilising their then new blog sites. I continued updating them for a decade or so after that, and migrated some content to other sites until c.2025.
On 26th April 2026, it was announced that Angelfire.com had closed. And so with it my family’s websites there were lost – except that I had backed up HTML files for the majority of the family content. It is from these backup HTML files that I am migrating the content of selected pages to this new website. Although, it is going to take quite a long time.
Meanwhile, back in 2008, I attended the amazing Knowledge Management conference in Canberra: ACTKM 2008. I met lots of Australian and International Knowledge Management gurus, and was exposed to so many new ideas and tools.
Up until then, I had been dismissive of blog sites, however I began to rethink my opinions. Consequently, I experimented with Posterous and others.
My Avatar at that time was Chococat
Others I experimented with were Tumbler and Blogger – along with Delicious Social Bookmarking, Hootsuite, Google Wave, Google +, Google RSS Readers. WordPress was mentioned, but seemed a little more complicated than I planned on using. I continued using Blogger regularly from 2009 to 2014.
Meanwhile Delicious, Posterous, Google Wave, Google +, Google RSS Reader all eventually closed. And I moved from Hootsuite, eventually onto Mastodon and Whatsapp – but I am not a big user of either of these sites.
I also moved from Delicious to Diigo, Posterous blogs posts to Blogger and Google RSS Reader to Feedly – I still use Diigo and Feedly.
My Blogger sites included:
In 2012, I became involved in a community group in my local area, and offered to look after the social media and website activities. The request was for WordPress, so finally I began to come to grips with WordPress, and I liked what I saw.
In late 2012, my Mother passed away, and I ended up with a lot of her family history paperwork, photos etc. And so I began to create a suite of family history sites on WordPress – see table below.
Consequently, I migrated some content from Blogger to WordPress. I also became involved in a museum in Bulli and created its websites. Next, I also joined the local Fellowship of First Fleeters Chapter, and eventually took over its website after the passing of its Webmaster, Bob Rickards. And there was also the Facebook content of the Fellowship of First Fleeters and the Museum in Bulli.
From 2020, there was a greater use of Zoom, and later MS Teams, with the Covid 19 Pandemic Lockdowns, to enable meetings to continue. Webinars became more popular.
Next it was looking after the national website of the Fellowship, based on HTML computer coding of pages, which had also been developed by the late Bob Rickards. Though, I could see there was a succession planning issue, with not so many people doing HTML computer coding, and so I created a WordPress site for the South Coast Chapter.
Ultimately, I also created a WordPress website for the Fellowship’s National website, migrating much of its content from the HTML coded website to the WordPress website. That continues to be a work in progress
And in 2026, I have now been joined into the Fellowship’s TinyHQ site, developed by a Millennial Member of the Fellowship. 2026 also saw my return to One Drive, with a greater use of Google Calendar and Outlook.
Also in 2026, sadly, I discovered that many blogs and websites, that I had greatly valued in past years, were no more.
It is unimaginable what the next decades will bring to digital media for community groups!
My Sites
blog community environment heritage housing Katrina School wordpress
Angelfire.id.KerrieAnneChristian 
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