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Who am I?
You can find me all over the web under the guise of Alex Atkin or Alex Atkin UK. I am highly opinionated, stubborn, and it never occured to me that all the stupid things I said as a teen would be immortalised in Internet archives.
I can only be thankful that this was all before social media, but of course I'm on those too.
Facebook - PSN (AlexAtkinUK) - Steam - Xbox (Alex Atkin UK) - YouTube
So what is CSD Projects?
It all started in my early teens when I was hoping to become a programmer.
Like most kids I wasn't happy just using my own name for things, I knew I needed something catchy, so I came up with the name Crazy Software Developments to plaster all over my cheesy STOS and AMOS atrocities.
Once I realised my programming skills left a lot to be desired and got to experience this new Internet thing that all the magazines had been talking about for years, I switched to writing websites instead. I realised the name didn't really work for a domain, so I abbreviated it to CSD Projects, which also helps by making it more generic to cover whatever projects I might decide to work on, web or otherwise.
My first public projects were websites about young actresses, Thora Birch, Mara Wilson, amongst others. It seemed hardly anyone was looking at young talent (I realise now it was probably the stigma from doing so) and I did not want to create a website about something that someone else already had.
For a time it was very rewarding, especially watching these kids grow up and many of them become talented adult actresses.
Over the years however I found myself mostly focusing on Mae Whitman, as she showed so much potential and had many high profile movie and TV roles. I couldn't believe how little attention she seemed to have on the web considering she had worked alongside such famous actors, in several big films.
However while deciding on which sites to focus on I got an unexpected e-mail from Debbie Hirsh, asking if I would create a webste about her daughter who had recently had her first high profile acting role alongside Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail.
I jumped at the chance, this would finally be an officially supported website with some credibility and exclusivity around it, rather than having to rely on IMDB for information and DVDs for images.
At this point, I realised that having two high profile websites alongside my older multi-actress site, was just too much work. I hadn't updated those sites in years so it didn't really make sense to keep them as websites, they were grossly outdated.
I also wanted to upload images from more different movies and TV shows for other actresses. Basically, to help other people creating fan sites who did not have the equipment to capture images for their sites themselves (it was early days for DVD ripping tools and HDD space was limited back then). However it was also early days for photo hosting sites, plus they did not accept fair-usage for vidcaps, you had to host them yourself to avoid them being deleted.
What I needed was a semi-automated site where I could just dump galleries of images for people to take and use on their own sites, basically something a lot like Yahoo Clubs but that had JUST been merged into Groups which was not really suitable any more. So I set off to learn about this new-fangled PHP, CSS and JavaScript everyone was raving about to see if it would help solve my problem.
CSD Clubs was born (now offline) and while it was never a big hit (thankfully, I did not have the resources to deal with all the complexity of a social network), it served its purpose. Mostly through giving me valuable knowledge of PHP, CSS and JavaScript which I have used to streamline my Hallee and Mae sites, making them much more interactive and easier to update.
However by 2012 both mine and my mothers health had deteriorated so I became a full time carer and did not have the energy to maintain the sites regularly. I spend my time more on forums, helping people with technical problems.