This is just a little bit about how the project started.

It was roughly 2012, and I was sitting in the Vine Hotel, Stafford one Friday lunchtime, and I’d just joined the CaskMarque App thing. I was already aware of Foursquare/Swarm, and I thought it would be a nice idea just to have my own little Pub Logging thing, just to keep track of pubs I’d been in and liked.

As I had my laptop with me, had a background in web development, and had nothing better to do all afternoon, I wrote a simple HTML/PHP/MySQL web page that I could run on my phone. I would take my location, work out the address, and save it to a database. Later, I would used the DB to create an KML file export to load into Google Earth.

(Some of this code was adapted into a vehicle tracking system, which is still used in an updated form by one company today).

Time passed, Thorin sat down and sang about gold, I upgraded my phone, and eventually forgot about the thing.

Last year, 2024, my hosting provider was taken over, and I was “invited” to review my account. I found the old database (and code that didn’t really work anymore due to PHP being updated).

I looked at the old idea and thought “Why did I waste that? I can make something useful from it!”

And after a few days of work (spread over serveral weeks), we are where we are….