Who runs this place anyway?
My name’s David Newkerk — pleasure to meet you.
If you’d like, you can read up a bit about me on my profile page.
A brief history of Absolute Cross
Absolute Cross started out some time around 1996 as a silly little page where I posted random things I came across on the internet (it was way back… way way back… when things like animated gifs, midi files, java applets, frames, dial-up internet, and Netscape Navigator were cool).
I began to try my hand at using HTML to create some of the amazing site layouts I came across (well, to be honest they weren’t amazing by today’s standards, but to a web design newbie in 1996 they were a marvel haha). To quench my unending desire for knowledge I picked up a huge book on HTML and read it cover-to-cover over the course of a weekend. Soon after, I began learning how to use Photoshop.
I discovered that I enjoyed teaching people the things I’d learned about web design, and so Absolute Cross began to transform into a place for the tutorials I was writing, and the graphics I was designing for practice. The site bounced between various free hosting sites and odd temporary names for a few years until I eventually decided on a real name for the site, registered the domain, and signed up for paid hosting.
One day a new little search engine called Google came along. Their robot seemed to find my site very tasty, and placed the site in the number one spot for “photoshop tutorials” and various other terms. The newfound increase in visitors led to plenty of fun learning about running my own dedicated server (although it’s dwindled some these days, at its peak Absolute Cross received up to ten thousand visitors a day).
Throughout the past decade or so Absolute Cross has gone through a variety of major overhauls, gradually making its way towards becoming the site you’re at right now. If you’d like to learn more about the latest & greatest version of the site (now powered by the Drupal content management system), you can read a detailed post about the full redesign of the site.
Hope you enjoy the site!