Yesterday, December 12th, Mobilitysite (Aximsite) turns 6.

When we have a birthday, we don't get gifts, we give them. Look out for contests over the next week. They are going to come in different shapes and sizes, some on the frontpage, some just in the forums. You might find one on our Twitter feed only or maybe Facebook? Who knows, just pay attention. Read on for a look back at 6 years and a list of the cool prizes we have in store this year. Warning, super long post ...

For those that don't know much about the history of Mobilitysite, here is a quick timeline for you. I have been doing amateur websites since 1998. In December 2002, I decided to go back to college. I was going to need a PDA of some sort to keep up with work and school. I bought a Casio BE300 (I think). It sucked. About that time, Dell released the Dell Axim x5 for a price average consumers could afford. I returned the Casio to Office Max and ordered a Dell Axim x5. During the wait time, I read online to try to know all I could about it before it arrived. There was very little to be found. What little I did find were on my, now great friend Jason Dunn's Site, Pocket PC Thoughts. Dale Coffing's, Pocket PC Passion was also a good wealth of info. I sucked all that info in and decided to make a site to share my new knowledge and experiences with others. I called it Aximsite. I had no idea what was in store. There are three things that I credit Aximsite's early success to:

2. Dell's Support and horrible forums. Sorry Dell, but the delay in shipping on the X5 and your forums pushed a lot of folks to Aximsite. Thanks!

3. Focused support for a hot device. We didn't allow people to rag on noobs to the PPC world and that went over well too.

Here is who I thanked in our 1st Birthday Post

For all this to happen a few things had to happen:
#1 - Dell, even though the CS stinks, them getting into the PPC ring made all of this possible. In fact their CS (no offense guys), made the site even more popular ....
#2 - Me get off my tuff and build it ...
#3 - All of you to come here ...
#4 - You all to like it enough to hang around ...
#5 - Our Moderators. They were both helpful and smart. They made me shine. Thanks to them and all of you !!!
#6 - Our advertisers. Go ahead thank them to, CLICK a LINK ... The advertisers make this site 100% free for all of you !

Aximsite added 10k members to the forums in the 1st month. Myself and the great mods that stepped up when the site boomed helped 100's of users, shared software and accessory review, and just had an awesome time. I kept messing with the software and layout of the site until about Valentine's day 2003. I finally settled on vBulletin and this layout ....

Somewhere near the end of 2003, I redesigned again and used that same look and feel for a couple years after that.

Anyhow. Back to the timeline and how we became Mobilitysite!

In the summer of 2003, Dell botched up the Pocket PC 2003 upgrade for the Dell Axim X5 while HP launched the HP iPAQ 2215 with Pocket PC 2003 already onboard. Some Axim owners jumped ship, lots even. The forums flourished though. There were workarounds, complaint, etc all over the forums. The community of Aximsite was super strong at this point. Many of the new 2215 owners asked me to create a sister site to provide a place for iPAQ owners in the same mold of Aximsite. I didn't have time with work, school, and Aximsite so I put it off. In December of 2003, I got myself an iPAQ 5550 and decided why not. I searched around and there were only a couple of iPAQ only sites out there. Both of the ones that seemed to be good were pretty inactive, so I created iPaqHQ.com. For a couple years, Aximsite and iPaqHQ ran side by side with separate user databases.

Somewhere along the way, I created mobilitysite.com on blogger as my personal/tech blog. (similar to chrisleckness.com is now). Just before CES 2006, I decided to merge iPaqHQ and Mobilitysite into one. HP had pissed me off by shutting us out of their review program unless we signed a very restrictive NDA. This NDA asked us to remove posts in our forums if they were negative towards HP. That and the fact that HP made an informal announcement that the PDA was dead and they were out of that business. Now we were running Mobilitysite and Aximsite side by side.

Over the next couple years, I have slowly made changes to migrate Aximsite into Mobilitysite. That transformation is pretty much complete now, but Aximsite is still close to my heart and I try to keep the feeling around.

I could type a 200 page post with how much fun this has been, how many people have touched my heart, and how many users the sites have helped. It's been a wild ride and I've loved almost every minute.

Throughout these 6 years, I have maintained a job and finished college. I don't plan on doing this for a living still and as far as I know, I am still Chris (aka AximsiteAdmin aka the Commish)

There have been tons of accomplishments that the sites have achieved over the years. Some personal accomplishments too. I have been a Microsoft MVP for 5 years. Julie and Elrendhel have become an MVPs as well. Jack Cook and Ctitanic came to the staff as MVPs. Did you know that Ctitanic has been an Aximsite member for a LONG LONG TIME? Yep.

There are so many memories archived in our forums that I couldn't read them all in one evening. I am so very thankful for all this. I want to give every member that has ever been around a prize, but I can't. That's 200K+ prizes.

Special thanks to everyone who has ever been a moderator, reviewer, news guy/gal. I would name each and every one of them, but once again, that would take all night. I love you guys.

Shut up Chris and show us the goods .... OK. Here they are

I know I am missing something, but hey ... that's it for now. Is it enough?

Remember, the contests are not going to be all posted in the same place. They are going to be done in different ways, so make sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed, Youtube Account, Facebook, Twitter, and register in the forums.

Due to the amount of time it takes to get all this done, we will be posting the contests over the next week. Some will last longer than others.

Thanks again everyone for helping me enjoy this hobby.