Interview with Paul Hosking About ITWire.com

About this Blog

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them.

• First was Jack Bremer and the U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.
• Second was Fotis Evangelou and the Greek sports website Gazzetta.gr.
• Third was Dan Lopez and Linux.com.
• Fourth was Azrul, Mike Carson and Sam Moffatt about Linux.com.
• Fifth was Matthew Philogene about Afro.Who.Int

This week we're talking with Paul Hosking about his role with iTWire.com, a major Australian technology website.

1) Hi Paul. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I'm 44 years old and I'm the Site Director and a co-founder of iTWire.com, I work remote in a very picturesque part of the Victorian country side, Mount Macedon with my family, wife, three kids and a dog. I graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1994 with a degree in music, media and one semester of computer studies (introduction to Microsoft office on a Mac). I first came in contact with the internet in 1995 whilst working in a Media department at the University of Melbourne, my mind was blown ... ever since then I've been hooked. By 1998 I was teaching first years how to code html, pretty basic stuff but it wasn't long before one of my drop outs came back to tell me that he'd got a job in web design based on several weeks of my course and that he was earning 4 times what I was. I resigned that week, got a client and started making web sites freelance. It was challenging work and hard to make a living when starting out. I eventually learnt how to build pretty good flat html sites. That worked for a while though the business model was straining; I build site, you pay me, you want change, you pay me and so on. Not great, there had to be a better way.

At that time I started to see sites appearing that had "amazing" technology like a search box. How do they do that? I thought. View source, umm what's this Mambo thing? Life, work and web sites were never going to be the same. From then on I built every site within a content management system (CSM), to varying levels of success and built a new business model around user updates and open source CMS. This is how I came to build the first iteration of iTWire, The Beerfiles (IT news blog) which first introduced me to online news. Since then I've moved further and further away from development becoming purely a high level user. I have found my skills are devoted to geting the best people possible to help me with development and hosting. Even though I still do CSS layout most days, I now avoid cutting php code as much as possible.