ViewFromThePit.com
ViewFromThePit.com (VFTP) was my very first website, while I was still in university.
VFTP was a metal music review site. It was 100% non-commercial. No adverts and I never made a penny off of the site. What VFTP did for me was give me access that I very few other people had to the musicians that I loved.
Over the years that I was running VFTP I could get backstage passes for free to almost any concert I wanted, received the latest album releases ahead of their release dates to allow us to review them, and got to meet and interview some of the biggest names in metal.
One year I attended 180 concerts in a single year (approximately one every two days) and attended 8 concerts in a single week (seeing the support act at one concert them rushing over to see the headline act at another venue), and went on tour with one of my favourite bands (Machine Head).
VFTP may never have made me any money, but for a young student it gave me experiences and a lifestyle that money couldn’t buy, and started my path to web development and running my own business.
In hindsight, VFTP was a very amateur project, and the quality of writing on the site was… not great. But I’m still very proud of it. So much so that I’ve rebought this domain and redirected it to this page. This was the early days of the internet, I was still very young, and this project gave me life experiences that were the building blocks of everything that was to come later.