My dad’s website is bigger than yours. No, really.
Since 1998 he’s been writing an encyclopedia about lathes. Every day he would come home from his day job, fire up MS Publisher and add a few hundred words to his latest article on an obscure Swiss watchmakers’ lathe, or perhaps some massive thing used in marine engineering.
It’s 2025 now. He’s 80 years old, and he uses MS Publisher 2003. Swears by it. He proudly explains to anyone who’ll listen, that the images are far too high in resolution for Publisher’s memory limit. While exporting the document as HTML one must use placeholder images which are then replaced with high-res versions. He uploads the lot with the same FTP app he’s used for twenty years or more. And do you know what?
It fucking works
If you google ‘lathes’, we’re at the top.
- No SEO
- No pay-per-click
- No JavaScript framework
Just the raw power of content.
For some this will be hard to remember, and for some hard to imagine; before the revolution of the internet there was a smaller, quieter revolution in home computing. During the mid-90s we must have been one of only a small number of families in the area to have a computer at home. During that time, my father’s side hustle was buying and selling lathes, and although he needed a bit of persuasion to buy a modem once it was set up he very quickly saw the potential. With his simple website he enjoyed an increase in sales, and also a lot of emails and phone calls from people all over the world needing advice, or looking for a user manual for their machine.
Here’s his site as it was in ‘98:
I don’t know how the collection started, but it did. By the mid 2000’s he had stopped selling machines entirely and was instead just selling copies of the manuals, along with a few parts and a selection of books. He would painstakingly clean up each manual in Photoshop, then print and bind copies to order. Orders were placed and paid for by phone. He also ran a classified adverts section. For £30 he’d clean up the photos and write the copy. Every ad got its own page that he assembled in Publisher. The service was well used; machines would change hands quickly as the site generated a lot of traffic and it was a better deal than eBay’s egregious 10% cut.
Around 2009, I had only an unfinished BA in music composition to my name, and no professional experience whatsoever. I also had no motivation or work ethic to speak of. Aged 23, broke and directionless, I moved back in with my parents. I’d spent the previous year living with friends - enjoying life and generally working as little as possible. But I did have a couple of web design clients during that time.
So for about a year I built my dad a Drupal 7 site (with Ubercart at first) and did a shit-tonne of data entry. I launched
store.lathes.co.uk in September 2011 just as I began my second attempt at a degree, this time a BSc in sound engineering and design.
Internet Archive’s Wayback machine shows we had 4,480 documents in December of 2012. I relied heavily on the Rules module, and built
the classified ads system with commerce_node_checkout.
We now have:
- 8,178 manuals, parts lists and catalogues
- 2,492 manufacturers
- 11,779 models
Here’s the D7 site in late 2024:
Sadly,
All good things must come to an end
For the last 13 years the site has run on Drupal 7, and has done so perfectly well.
However in its eighth iteration, Drupal was completely rebuilt using Symfony. This presented a big problem for a lot of people. As ambitious site builders, almost everything we had learned so far was now useless. From this point on, it was no longer possible to build a Drupal site as a simple web designer who dabbled in PHP. The learning curve was steep but I stuck it out.
And finally it’s done.
The following articles are to do with the migration and the development work that went into the new site: