Welcome to Data-drop.com. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

My family website started when my wife and I found out we were going to have a child. My wife was 2 months pregnant and everyone wanted to know what was happening. Of course you get sonogram images at 5 months but we had them at 2 months. So I decided that we should put up a small website for family members to come and view pictures of my wife pregnant and all the glorious things that come with it. Of course we needed an image gallery. Then it struck me. My wife had to have a baby shower. All her friends were emailing everything back and forth and things were getting messed up. So I launched the site. I used wordpress for a blog style for ease of update and so my wife could write to family just how she felt. The next thing I got working was the family forums. Everyone in our family laughed at me when I put this up there. No one is going to use it. So just a trial I setup the forums with a restricted area my wife couldn’t see and voila, now everyone saw some use here. We can plan a baby shower without her knowing and we wouldn’t have to talk on the phone. Planning a baby shower in forums was the easiest thing I had ever done. Lets just say within 3 weeks we had everything planned including how to get her there. Yes it was a surprise. So the first hurdle was overcome. Now came the big thing. My wife was 6 month pregnant and every time we went somewhere everyone was trying to guess if it was a boy or girl, or when it was due. This became somewhat of a game for us. We decided that we should have a Due date guessing game. I put a form on the website to collect people’s guesses and charged 1 dollar for each guess. We called it the baby 50/50 drawing. 50% goes to whoever was closest to the actual time and date, and 50% goes to start our child’s college fund. I thought that it might make $40 dollars and just be a fun way of guessing. Paypal and a custom built script drove this. After the first week we had cleared my $40 dollar mark and climbing about 10 guesses a day. We cut off guessing on my wifes official due date that the hospital gave us. June 10, 2007. We even gave people this information. Well the guessing continued and the pot grew. You wouldn’t believe how many people guessed before the due date. We only had 3 or 4 guesses that were even close. June 15^th 11:45PM our daughter was born. After all the festivities were over and we were home I checked to see who was closest. No one. Not within 3 days. I contacted the person that guessed and said that we should just keep the money for her account. All she wanted in return was to continue updating the site with pictures of our child. We started her account with $300 Not bad for a college fund.

After she was born the picture updates continued. Something was missing. A picture is great but what about videos. We have family all over the country. Then 1 week before she was baptized we decided to get a new digital camera. While playing with it I found out I could do really nice short video clips. Yes that made it to the site. We video tapped the entire baptism and posted it to our site. There are plenty of articles on the web about this im not going into it. With video updates everyone is happy. The image gallery I chose is called Gallery. I found all my software here. Yes I do mean I didn’t spend a dime on software to make our site. Just the domain registration. If you want to check out my family site or want help setting your own site up let me know.