The Archdiggers website has its origins in 1999 with the Dunragit excavations web site, at this point I was finishing a Masters at Southampton University and running a daily online diary page for Julian Thomas’s excavations at Dunragit (Dumfries and Galloway)
The site was an early experiment in communicating via digital media, it took most of the day and night to get text and images online, a job that could now be done in a few seconds via a phone. The site was rather eccentric, but then an online diary of a dig is likely to develop its own character however Ivan the Rat may have been a step too far.
The site also included several galleries of my Diggers Project portraits started in 1993 and included portraits from Dunragit. The excavations lasted from 1999 to 2003, during this period the site was hosted on the University’s servers however eventually I decided to set up my own site and towards the end of 2003 I created the archdiggers site at archdiggers.co.uk with its own domain.
Initially the site was created just running with HTML, style sheets and occasional Javascript after a few years I changed the structure of the site to ASP.net, this ran succesfully for quite a few years until my host provider dropped support for the database I was using.
At this point I didn’t wish to relearn the scripting required to use a different database setup (or the cost involved) so eventually I opted for the easier to manage WordPress option and so the site is in its current form.