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One year ago today (April 4) is the day retouchpro.com first went online.
It's simultaneously hard to believe it's been a year already, and that it's only been a year. So many things have changed in that year (both here and everywhere else).
We started with a tiny bit of hd space on a free webserver, a freeware forum, a couple of links and one book review. I put it up and just sat there staring at it, all by myself. Only after some guilt-inducing spam did anyone even know we existed and start to visit. You can look through the oldest threads here to see some of their first posts...most of them still visit, but many don't.
Four months later we'd outgrown all our free resources, and people began to chip in so we could expand. I thought it would take forever for us to break 28 users (that was the total on our original forum), then came 50, then 100...until now we have over 400.
A lot of stuff has started here that I'd never imagined when I first started thinking about the site (the Challenges are one good example). Plus I still haven't been able to do a lot of the things I initially planned to, and still plan to, for many different reasons.
For that matter, the site overall has turned out to be a very different place than I'd imagined. And I couldn't be happier about that.
The main thing, in a way the only thing of importance, is that we seem to get the nicest people on the internet here. I just had another opportunity yesterday to be reminded about that.
I don't know if you've been out on the rest of the net lately, but it can be an unfriendly place...an uncouth, selfish, even dangerous place. But not here. This is not my first experience with administering a website, and I have had some bad experiences before. But I am continually surprised at the generosity, friendliness, and general supportiveness, both here and in the real world, of our members.
Thank you all.
So, happy birthday to us, and here's to many more.
It's simultaneously hard to believe it's been a year already, and that it's only been a year. So many things have changed in that year (both here and everywhere else).
We started with a tiny bit of hd space on a free webserver, a freeware forum, a couple of links and one book review. I put it up and just sat there staring at it, all by myself. Only after some guilt-inducing spam did anyone even know we existed and start to visit. You can look through the oldest threads here to see some of their first posts...most of them still visit, but many don't.
Four months later we'd outgrown all our free resources, and people began to chip in so we could expand. I thought it would take forever for us to break 28 users (that was the total on our original forum), then came 50, then 100...until now we have over 400.
A lot of stuff has started here that I'd never imagined when I first started thinking about the site (the Challenges are one good example). Plus I still haven't been able to do a lot of the things I initially planned to, and still plan to, for many different reasons.
For that matter, the site overall has turned out to be a very different place than I'd imagined. And I couldn't be happier about that.
The main thing, in a way the only thing of importance, is that we seem to get the nicest people on the internet here. I just had another opportunity yesterday to be reminded about that.
I don't know if you've been out on the rest of the net lately, but it can be an unfriendly place...an uncouth, selfish, even dangerous place. But not here. This is not my first experience with administering a website, and I have had some bad experiences before. But I am continually surprised at the generosity, friendliness, and general supportiveness, both here and in the real world, of our members.
Thank you all.
So, happy birthday to us, and here's to many more.
Thanks, Doug, for all of the time and energy you put into the site. And thanks to everyone for making these forums a "safe" place to ask questions and learn. There are other sites with tips and techniques that I find useful from time to time, but none with the sense of community that this one has. Add to that the fact that I can find an answer to just about anything I need here and it's pretty easy to see why this is my "home base" on the internet. 
Congratulations Doug!
hope this site is around for many years to come!
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