Unofficial Royalty

In December 1993 I moved from The Netherlands to the UK and one the things that fascinated me was the obsession of the British press with the Royal Family. Since they wouldn't publish it if nobody would read it, I started to wonder what was so interesting about the British royals that it managed to keep such an interest among the press and people. I found a really cute little site from Bedetech Genealogy software. On this site they published links to stories in the (at that time only a few) online press.

In 1995 Bedetech stopped publishing their news links. At around the same time, I was given some webspace by my ISP and I didn't know what to do with it. Well, 1 + 1 = 2, so I decided to take over the royal news updates. Initially hosted at http://www.etoile.demon.co.uk/ and consisting of just the one news page. But... people apparently thought that I knew a lot more about the British royals and started to email me all sorts of questions. Rather than answering each individual email, I decided to add a Frequently Asked Questions page for the British royals. Little by little the site started growing.

Then, in August 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales died and things went crazy. For the techies among you, Demon allowed website traffic of 25MB a month. My site was using up 2GB a day! So Demon in all its wisdom (not!) decided to kill off my site. Daft decision if you ask me, just think of the amount of advertising they could have sold if they had decided to make a deal with me, but oh well... By doing that, Demon forced me to find a different ISP and I decided that I might as well purchase a domain name at the same time. So the site relocated to http://www.etoile.co.uk where it stayed a great many years, until September 2009. During those years, sites were added for the Danish, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish royal familes as well as one for the Romanovs from Tsarist Russia. The Yahoo Group associated with the site was also finally fully integrated in the site in the form of a forum.

By now it was also not just me anymore who worked and contributed on the site. Several people had contributed content for the different monarchies, and a team of columnists wrote regular editorials/opinion pieces about the various monarchies. Doing the news updates - a job that takes a good 2 hours per day - had also become too much for just one person to handle on a daily basis. I even got threatening emails about how I dared to go on vacation and not update the news! So I asked, and found, a wonderful group of volunteers who help out with the daily news updates, and back each other up during vacations

Over time the site design had become very old, and the site itself had become very difficult to maintain. Browsers and internet standards had changed, while the site had not. Also, with the larger number of contributors now working on the site it made sense to review the process of adding site content. So a CMS (content management system) was chosen, and I decided to move the domain once more (for the last time!) to a new domain with a name that would fit the site better: http://www.unofficialroyalty.com/ where you are visiting right now.

A special thanks go to Susan and Scott, who have helped to move all the content across from the old site to its new location. Without them, it would have taken so much longer!

I also want to thank all volunteers who have helped with contributing content, columns, being a moderator, or updating the news. And of course all of the visitors to the site, who make it all worth it!

-- Geraldine

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