Birthdays sometimes creep up on us, but we’ve been keeping an eye on this date for some time. Since EduGeek went live on 9^th June 2005, we have often missed our birthday, but not this year; this year we turned 20 years old!

To celebrate this, we have asked our sponsors, both past and present, to help us out with organising some competitions for you all, and many of them kindly agreed. You can find them here on the side bar (UK Only).

EduGeek started as a small hobby site that I thought would only get perhaps 200 members if I was lucky and that I could run it as a nice, cheaply hosted hobby and make some EdTechs lives a little easier. Please keep in mind that, when we started, some schools were still using Windows 98 on the desktop and NT 4.0 servers!

It turns out I underestimated just how many EdTechs there were out there as we now have over 114,000 members and 7.5 million visits per year from around the world. Cloudflare says many, many more, but we can only claim what we can prove and filtering and script blockers play merry hell with analytic stats!

From our point of view, especially after spending time going through our photo archive, it really does bring home just how far we have come. Our original site was hosted on Fasthosts using a free CMS system called Dragonfly which was underpinned by the phpBB forum.

The one thing I never forget though is the sheer number of people we have met in person. So many have said nice things to us about how they have been helped by the EduGeek community over the years and it’s always a humbling experience.
 

On a personal level, my social circles have increased greatly. The initial help was offered by members such as @GrumbleDook, @russdevand @Ric_ . Then the sudden appearance of @ZeroHour via a late night MSN Messenger chat in our very early days with an offer of help with some performance problems that we were having (cheap hosting, ropey CMS system and high usage do not for a well performing site make), meant we suddenly had a webmaster and someone to look after all the tech side of the site allowing me to concentrate on spreading the word about EduGeek.

From there we formed a core group of admins and moderators, all of whom worked in schools, and things began to take off. We organised conferences and events and began to exhibit at BETT where we have been a fixture since 2007.

Just like any community, we have seen people come and people go. Some have joined, stayed and contributed since our very early days. Some have left the EdTech sector and stayed on the site . And some have moved on and returned. Many of us have married and raised families and many of us have had the kind of incidents life will throw at us at some point during our lives. These events have often been shared within the forums where we see members rally around those needing their support. It's been truly amazing to have seen you all step in when required. Sadly, we have also lost members along the way and we created the ‘GNU’ tag to memorialise those members’ posts in the forums.

There really isn’t the time and space to mention everyone that we would like to thank individually, but to those who have helped and influenced us the most, we’d like to say how privileged and humbled we are to have known you over the years. So, in no particular order, we’d like to thank the following:

1. You, our members. You have been, without doubt, the most helpful, knowledgeable and funny group we could have ever wished to meet. Thank you for making our work worthwhile.
2. The forum sponsors and advertisers, both current and past. Without you, the good ship EduGeek would not have been able to navigate the choppy waters of the EdTech world and provide support to millions each year. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
3. Our moderators. Over the years we have had many people join and leave our team of mods. They have ensured the site has stayed spam free and a safe place for members to participate. They have helped at events, provided ideas and taken a great weight from our workloads. You really don't know how much work they put in behind the scenes and I am forever thankful for their help and time.
4. And finally, the many people we would like to thank personally, but there simply isn’t the time and space to list you all, but we hope you know who you are. We do.

I have edited this article many times over the past week or so and have to admit that it’s really (really) hard to get 20 years of EduGeek down into a few hundred words. So, in the end, I didn't try. There will be a post going up this week with a potted timeline of significant dates and events with pictures we think you would like to see. If you have any old pics of EduGeek conferences and events that have attended, or funny stories from things that have happened on the site, then please post them up there when it goes live. It’ll be interesting to see things from your side.

Here's to the future and we hope that you stay with us to see what happens next.

Thanks everyone, from all of us here at EduGeek