I know it’s hard to believe from the truly amateur feel of this blogsite, but this isn’t my first foray into Web development. In fact, this is the fourth or fifth website I’ve put together. My first (and most widely-read) website was BeerScene. I still get asked about this every so often, so for historical record, here’s the full story.
Back in the day (some 15 years ago), I was involved in the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in England. This is a consumer organization that promotes ‘real’ beer – i.e. not the mass-produced, over-chilled, artifically-carbonated beer that dominates the industry. Being a writer by trade, I used to contribute to, and eventually edit, Ale Mail, the newsletter of our local branch. On the back of this, I set up a website that was initially planned as an online companion to Ale Mail, but turned into my own personal mouthpiece (as, some would say, Ale Mail also did!).
So I set up a Website, writing all of the content, and doing all of the HTML coding by hand (in Windows Notepad) until I could afford a copy of HotMetal Pro. To avoid using the CAMRA name anywhere (which would have meant getting their approval for whatever I posted) I called the site BeerScene. My service provider at the time was Demon, who offered (I think) 5Meg of web space with my e-mail account, so I just used that (Web servers were the preserve of ‘real’ companies in those days) which meant that the URL for this site was “www.demon.co.uk/beerscene” (don’t look for it now – it’s not there).
Over the years, this grew into a pretty good site. I updated it monthly with news from the brewing industry, irreverent attacks on the Government’s policy towards drinkers and independent breweries, and a bunch of stuff just designed to entertain drinkers. I also developed a database that contained details of every British real ale brewer, along with every beer they brewed. This was in the days before SQL Server databases, so I developed it in Microsoft Access, and wrote a bunch of macros to automatically build the HTML files and indexes, which I’d then load onto the server via FTP. I thought it was all very clever at the time.
Over time, BeerScene started picking up interest. This was probably due to the fact that there were very few sites offering this type of material. There were certainly a lot less sites than there are today, so maybe people were just desparate. Whatever. The egotist in me was just happy to see the hit-count rising, month-on-month.  BeerScene started getting linked to by a growing number of other beer-related sites that started cropping up, and even garnered an honorable mention in .net magazine.
Every so often I’d get contacted by one of these other sites (some commercial, most personal), who wanted to ‘join’ BeerScene, contribute to BeerScene, or be involved in one way or another.  I always demurred, preferring to retain full editorial control.  At some stage, I was approached by another site, called BreWorld. They said they really liked what I was doing with BeerScene, and offered to host it, untouched, on their servers. Being fiercely protective of my independence, and smelling the potential of outside interference further down the line, I politely refused. They persisted, this time offering to ‘merge’ with BeerScene and give me the opportunity to reach all of their audience as well as mine, absorb all server costs, and so on. There was quite a lot of overlap between my site and theirs, so again, I declined.
BreWorld seemed to take the hint, and backed off. Or at least it all went quiet. I didn’t give it any more thought, until one of my regular readers contacted me to congratulate me on the new look to my site. Puzzled, I checked it out, only to discover that someone had launched a site called BeerScene, at “www.beerscene.com”. A bit of poking around, and I discovered that this new site belonged to none other than BreWorld! They’d obviously decided they wanted the name BeerScene, and if they couldn’t trick me into relinquishing it via a ‘merger’ or hosting, they’d just take it over by brute force. The company refused to answer my calls or return my e-mails, and I was left with trying to inform everyone that “www.beerscene.com” was not the real BeerScene.
I did contact a solicitor (attorney) but they advised me that as my site was not a commercial site, I would be hard pushed to claim ‘fraud’. I could take them to court and plead ‘established use’, but (1) it would cost me, and (2) I wouldn’t necessarily win. So somewhat reluctantly, I admitted defeat. In fact, I just shut the whole of BeerScene down – removed it from the servers (so that BreWorld couldn’t steal my content, too), and walked away. I really enjoyed my years building BeerScene, and I was very upset (actually, furious) at giving it up, but once you have to call in the lawyers, that just takes all the fun out of it.
So there you have it – my 15 minutes of almost-fame in the tiny world of British brewing. Despite me terminating BeerScene some 10 years ago, you can still find the odd reference to BeerScene (try Googling it), but all the links are now dead-ends.
But on a happier note, I see, with a certain degree of schadenfreude, that breworld.com has also folded (and hopefully BewWorld Ltd. with it), and beerscene.com is now yet another search aggregator. Hmm, maybe now’s the time to swoop in with a bid…
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