Back in 2001 I worked for a “New Media” agency (Vital Online), who offered all employees a free domain and hosting as a staff benefit. I thought long and hard about what I could do with it. I had a few ideas of domains – all had gone, then I came up with Dragondrop. The phrase Drag And Drop was at the time rooting itself into household computing phraseology. At the time we’d just moved into an area of Harrogate where an Avenue, Road and Parade all had the suffix ‘Dragon’ so with the above in mind, and the notion for a dot org – a not for profit organization, I plumped for DragonDrop.org and the rest – voila.
The holding page from summer 2001 – still available for your perusal at archive.org boasted an offering of bog reads and anti boredom leads. I still quite like that.
Dragondrop.org’s first regular content was provided by the watchcam stuff – I was obsessed with my Casio WQV-3 and later the colour WQV-10 which later spawned the world's leading watchcam forum also hosted on DragonDrop.org.
In 2002 I’d seen a few blogs – so – I decided to start one of my own just before a big trip to Australia and the blog has been the main stalwart of the domain since.
More recently, the shirts came along – an idea inspired by an outward bound type shop (Out and About in Harrogate) who had photos of their bags from all over the world – I did the same thing with T-Shirts – if ANYONE I KNOW is going somewhere cool, I’ll give them a shirt and say – get yourself photographed somewhere wearing this and I’ll stick you in the gallery.
The forum (now dead, RIP) morphed into a rather popular social network covering a vast range of topics and conversations. FIRE (party) was largely spawned and informed from the ‘DragonDrop community’.
I used the blog to document everything of note for over 20 years. Kids, gigs, pets, travels, photography.. and much more. I wove flickr and instagram into it and used it to spearhead many many things.
Towards the end, it had fizzled, then I hit a major blocker to do with http vs https and would have taken a huge undertaking to sort it - long story short, the site went offline from around 2022 to 2026.
Bringing us up to date - in September 2026, I recovered most of the site and re published it as an archive. I'm now in the process of turning it into a dependable archive, and thinking about.. what next?
Technology
Blogger then wordpress drive the back end. Flickr hosts the photo cloud. Various cameras, phones, computers, connections and box fuls of assorted gadgets and toys. One of the most significant gadgets would be the WQV-10 which spawned the watchcam adventures. (Now RIP.. some of it is still kicking around) It's currently a full local markdown collection of thousands of pages that a python script converts these and a bunch of JSON-LD into web pages. One of which, you're reading now.
People
Matt : Designer. Mostly digital these days, but I've done all sorts of design. I'm also a conga player and DJ.
– Husband of Eirene, Father of Felix, Jaygo, Sophie & Annie.
Eirene day job – looking after us lot + story teller and author of children’s novels, short stories and poems.
“20th Century Boy” : Felix is son No1 of Matt & Eirene, born in 1998
“21st Century Boy” : Jaygo is son No2 of Matt & Eirene, born 2001
“21st Century Girl” : Sophie is daughter No1 of Matt & Eirene, born 2006
“St Paddy’s day Girl”: Annie is daughter No2 of Matt & Eirene, born 17th March, 2013
DragonDrop is also frequented by a lovely group of friends.
Well done for reading all of this. Have a lollipop.