In the early 90's when I was at the University of Florida I mostly used the internet for USENET, e-mail and browsing the then-infant web via Lynx. One of the TV shows I watched was Absolutely Fabulous on Comedy Central/BBC. There was of course a USENET group and a mailing list where fans talked at lengths about the show. At the time most groups had a Frequently Asked Questions associated with them. AbFab, however, did not.

During the spring of 1995 I sent a message to the AbFab e-mail list asking, "How come nobody has ever created an AbFab FAQ?" I was quickly answered by a rather rude Englishman saying, "Typical Americans, you never want to do anything for yourselves, you always want somebody else to do the work for you." With that I spent my spring break teaching myself HTML and researching the show.

On March 16th, 1995 I uploaded the AbFab FAQ to my Alachua Freenet Account (afn.org) and posted it to the USENET groups: alt.tv.absolutely-fabulous, alt-tv.abfab and alt.tv-british-comedy.

I kept up with the FAQ for quite a while, but eventually turned it over to a two girls from the Netherlands which is where it now resides. I'm not responsible for the current design though :-)

In 1996 I started a company called RIDGE web designs (Ridge is my middle name). I soon had my first paying client, Simonds Manufacturing. Scarily, the web site I built is still online, animated GIFs and all.

Within a matter of months RIDGE became webcode and the I was off and running. Below is the original logo for the company from 1996:

I still put little things in the HTML code to mark my territory though.