Recap

Last on December 31 2015

Its hard to believe that I'd owned the fiesta for 23 years (Since 1992) when I finally sold it in 2015. It really doesn't seem that long ago that I was bringing it home on the back of rented trailer. When the idea was born to transplant a zetec engine I struggled to find anyone else doing anything similar. Soon I realised I wanted to write about my zetec conversion, but this was in the infancy of the internet. Years even before the dotcom bubble. I started out with keeping various forums up to date, threads on the build were started and maintained. But I wasn't getting the exposure I needed. I wanted to attract sponsors to help reduce the costs. I had to buy some web space and learn how to write web pages.

I started off with 10Mb of space on virgin.net and publicised my web site address on the same forums. Soon I was building quite a following, and searching for my site on yahoo and other search engine the site was appearing quite high up in the results.

It wasn't until I registered the zetecinside.com domain name that the site really started to get some recognition. After buying the domain and redirecting it to my freespace at virgin.net I found that I simply didn't have enough space for all of the photographs and content that I was trying to provide. So the next step was to find a host, not too expensive, but one that would provide 24/7/365 availability, with plenty of space for storing content, and I had to turn to a company in the US, who I've used now for 15 years. Trouble is that that also costs money to run. So I have adverts on the website which pay for the hosting and domain name fees. I don't make a profit from running the site. It pays for itself.

Video is now hosted by YouTube, and why wouldn't you use a free service? The size of the in car video files in HD are too big to consider hosting locally. And pictures sizes also continue to grow so again, these are hosted by Picasa, another cloud based service, not free but far less cumbersome for me to publish pictures from. I don't use a content management system either. All my web pages are hand crafted which was initially laborious to do, but once it was setup, remains simple to maintain.

Since the site has been around for such a long time, the Webarchive holds many different versions of the site. Visit the following URL http://web.archive.org to see how much the site has changed over the years.

But the main thing for me now is the number of friends I've made through contact made via the website. It is incredible the number of emails I get every month, mostly questions about Zetec conversions, and I do get a lot of emails from the US as well as Europe. I answer as best I can. I refer many to other websites and forum's where people more qualified than I are able to answer them.

Have a look around. You may find something of interest. After all the site is 100% Ford with a bit of humour and geek thrown in for good measure. Its all about sharing knowledge for me. And I'll keep the site updates coming for as long as I can. :-)