Today’s guest post is by my friend James Cooper. I’ve loved his Why Christmas? website for years, and I’m honored he accepted my invitation to write about how it came about.
Hi, let me introduce myself, I’m James Cooper, a freelance web designer/developer from the United Kingdom. I’ve known Deborah “online” for several years; first through the old Godbit forums and now via Twitter.
I’m grateful she’s asked me to tell you about my Christmas site on her blog!
Much of my Novembers and Decembers are now taken up with running some Christmas sites, including my main one, Why Christmas?—it’s about the biggest Christmas information site on the web.
There’s information about
- The history of Christmas traditions and customs
- How Christmas is celebrated in over 80 countries around the world
- The Christmas Story (in several different versions, written, audio and comic!) and its history, and
- Lots of Christmas fun and activities
What Was the Idea Behind the First Site?
The site was actually one of the first sites I ever created, back in 2000, when I was first starting to be involved in web things.
Back then my dad was the “Chair of Governors” (UK equivalent of the head of a PTA) at a large Primary School (elementary school) in North London, where we lived at the time.
Some of the teachers in the school came to me asking that they couldn’t find a site that was child friendly and “wasn’t trying to sell the kids something.”
In 2000, the only really “child” based sites with any connection to Christmas were run by the likes of Disney and Nickelodeon, and were really trying to sell their DVDs and the like.
So for a fun little project, and to help me practice my HTML(!) I created a “little Christmas site” for a single school.
I could have never imagined that it would grow into the Christmas beast that it’s now become!
I’m a Christian, and grew up in a Christian family, and have always loved Christmas and all the traditions around it.
So I thought it would be fun to find out some more about Christmas as I built the site.
How the Site was Designed
If I think back to the code I first used to the create the site, it makes me cringe.
There were frames, tables, fonts, and a good sprinkling of DHMTL (remember that?!) – but they were the cutting edge on the web back then.
I used SHTML to include items like the header and footer on the pages. If you visit the site, you’ll see that the pages still end in .shtml (but it now uses PHP to include things, the file endings are just a nice throw back that I’ve kept)!
The site was originally designed for 800 pixels x 600 pixels and was tested in Netscape 4 and 6 as well as Internet Explorer 4 and 5!
In that first year, the site got a few thousand hits, mainly from the school and some friends and family who I got to look at the site.
Over the next few years, I slowly added to the site, for a bit of fun, as I did more research into Christmas and some lovely visitors to site sent me information about how they celebrated Christmas around the world.
By about 2005, I was well and truly hooked on all things Christmas and was well on the way to becoming The Christmas Expert (seriously, I am…)!
Shared Hosting and Popularity
To start with, the site was hosted on the shared hosting I used for my other sites. This was with reseller that belonged to a friend (and was based on HostGator).
Things started getting serious on the 16th November 2006, when I received an email with the title “whychristmas.com crashing server.”
It turned out the site was spiking at 70% CPU usage—oops!
So that November and December, the site was moved onto a newer server, which only had a couple of other sites on it (and could take the strain).
Google Takes Notice
However, a couple of years later, on 3rd December 2008 another email arrived, this time with the title “EMERGENCY – Whychristmas.com.”
It seems around this time, Google really started to like this site and it was going truly “mainstream” with very many schools around the world using as a big information source.
This time it was “idling” using 40 percent + of the CPU use (maxing them at 100% a few days later) and using 7.5GBs of bandwidth a day (which for back then was a lot)!
Remember this was a tiny static site (the whole site is still only about 3.5mb in total) eating servers for breakfast!
In December 2008, according to Google Analytics, the site had over 2.4 millions page loads.
I was very thankful for the understanding host I had up until 2008, but all they could offer for Christmas 2009 and beyond was a truly dedicated server, which I knew I simply couldn’t afford…
The running of the site has always come out of my pocket (along with some donation from friends and family).
On to a Better Hosting Solution
The site was originally created with a deliberate no ads policy and still has that today.
It’s one of things that makes it different and every year I get emails from teachers thanking me that their classes can use it without anything appearing that they might not want to!
So after melting “normal” servers, what was I to do?
Thankfully the answer came in the form of an online friend from another Christian web design group.
Joshua is a bit of an all round server genius and suggested we should try using a small instance on Linode with some some fancy caching.
In October 2009, the site moved over to Linode where it’s lived ever since.
Joshua’s setup of Linode (and a few subsequent tweaks) have enabled it to cope with more and more visitors over the years.
The other major hosting change came in 2014, when CloudFlare was also added into the mix and that is now a vital part of the hosting solution. (I’m writing this on Black Friday 2018 and yesterday alone CloudFlare saved the site 7.5GB of bandwidth!)
From that initially mind blowing 2.4 million page loads in 2008, the Why Christmas? site in December 2017 had 16 million+ page loads according to Google Analytics (and probably about a million more with all the ad blockers now being used).
Those numbers still make my brain hurt…!
New Technologies Keep Site Running Smoothly
Over the 18 years the site has been running, the code has been updated as new web technologies arrived.
The frames and tables became the 960 grid system and some basic CSS; then skeleton.css, more CSS and media queries (oooh, responsive…).
This year the site has gone all flexbox(!).
And I’ve also switched to using some “sharing tools” that I’ve made myself rather than a third party system (I’m not interested in the sharing stats) – that alone has taken over 300KB off each page load.
I’ve also switched to using as much vanilla JS as possible.
Some of the games on the site still use jQuery, as it’s still the best solution for those features.
Why Christmas? Expands with New Content
The site has continued to grow, with more traditions, countries and all round merriment being added, like
I’ve also become more and more of a Christmas geek—I own over 250 Xmas albums…!
As well the site visitor numbers growing, so has the number of Christmas sites I run!
In 2010 I launched the Christmas Karaoke site (it’s still the best domain name I’ve got!); it also lives on Linode.
And in 2014, I officially became The Christmas Expert.
A simple one-page site, it helps media like radio stations find someone to talk about Christmas traditions, etc. (I did my first radio spot of the season last month!)
There’s also First Christmas Story, a one-page site with the Christmas Story on it.
What makes this special is that it initially loads in 6KB!
Wrapping Up
So that’s the story of how my “little Christmas site” has grown over the last 18 years, become an adult, and now takes up two months of my life every year—and I love it!
(It also makes me feel rather old to think that most of the children who will use the site now weren’t even born went it first went live!)
So please give Why Christmas? a visit if you’re in the need of some Christmas spirit.
