Select Page

There was once a HOC

There was once a HOC

This writing is a consequence of a process I call blogging. It wouldn’t have a place on a fair news portal, it wouldn’t have been on HOC for a long time, but today, now, lately, everything was different than it used to be. This writing is both a little retrospective and a little forward-looking. Reflection on past and future things related to the site, HOC.hu, as I see it.

There was once a HOC

The first Joomla based HOC

Let’s start the way we fit in with the past. HOC, initially HardwareOC, started a decade and a half ago as an emerging news portal. This was at a time when the gaming community was still gathering at MPortal, HWSW was the largest online hardware magazine, and Prohardver was just scratching 2500-3000 visitors a day. It is small that the date does not need to be BC. put a marker there. It was a different world than it is now, and of course we were different. In fact, thinking back in this way, one really realizes how much change has taken place in the online world in just 15 years.

There was once a HOC 1It was the best search engine of old

 

In headlines only. Google was launched at that time, but Hungarians were mostly looking for Altavizsla. Facebook wasn’t even born, but there wasn’t even WIW or IWIW, that social media didn’t even hear who invented the word. Youtube? Leave already! Double ADSL? 128 kilobit connection? You were king until you stabbed your download manager and stopped downloading even when you had to pay a day rate. The corporate 1 mega line was in Canaan, the non-plus ultra on which you could push up a ripped game to university warez ftp in half an hour.

Do you already understand what it means to be a different world? IRC? Right? That was the otherworld. PHP was still a relatively fresh thing, the world had just grown out of static HTML content where every new news had to be manually edited into the page. Fortunately, when HOC, HardwareOC was launched it was a thing of the past. The first CMS systems (content management systems) were introduced, such as their predecessor, which now runs under the site (Joomla), or the no less popular WordPress, which started as a low-cost blog engine anyway.

Under HardwareOC, an engine called PHP Nuke worked. True, not for long, because we soon realized that this would not meet our needs. We soon looked for a programmer. I don’t remember his name anymore, just that he reportedly worked for HWSW as well. That was enough for me then. I was a beginner with a sour mouth, he and his bloodthirsty internet guru. Yeah, Internet, because at that time I still had to write a big I according to the spelling rules. So we got the advice to look for a foreign site that likes your design, save it, and then cast a engine behind it. My moral sense was a little disturbed by this solution, but he said it was common practice for everyone to do this, even HWSW stretched the first one. Needless to say it wasn’t a good idea for this stretch down thing. Two people knew which side I liked. One of these was the programmer. Still, the day after the engine and design change, I had already read on the PH forum that we had stolen from this and that site. It was unpleasant because, on the one hand, it was true, on the other hand, it was stabbed in the back who did just that, only on his own side, and thirdly, because the whole side became unacceptable in the form it was then.

 

There was once a HOC 2
MPortal, where the muliplayer community used to be

This gicher was our great luck then, because we found Gabriel, our programmer, who then paved the way for many years. Eternal thanks to him, I mourned many times with stupid ideas and always endless patience in my direction. We got to the top with the engine he wrote, which of course was not such a peak that it was the largest domestic IT or hardware site, only a visitor peak reached by the site. It was about 10 unique visitors a day anyway. A little more during the week and less on the weekends. On a monthly basis, this meant between 200 and 250 thousand unique hits, which was a pretty decent result. We weren’t a Prohardware or an HWSW either, but it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t just because over the years, no site could survive in this segment for more than half a year, more than a year, so every advertiser who couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for the two big ones came to us. At that time, we had contracts with 16 wholesalers, of course in addition to the domestic representations of the more famous manufacturers.

This is how we arrived at the beginning of the end, the year 2008. By then, our own editorial office was already ready, seven of us worked full-time at the HOC. I had just hired poor colleague Alesi with his recent degree as the fifth editor, when our wholesale partners started to fall in love. He was the first person I had to quit, and he was still on probation. He didn't like me for that, I can understand why. Everything collapsed around us. The crisis kicked the door on us, we were a company that sacrificed every HUF of income on the altar of development. We went into the ground without reserves, the never-received consideration for the issued invoices reached an eight-figure sum at the final settlement. These were the taxed invoices. In retrospect, after many years, we managed to collect some money here and there, but the loss was still insane compared to the size of the company. Here I thought about whether to write company names, since there are still "flourishing" businesses that showed signs of success at the time, and although our invoices were good for expenses, they have not been paid since then. Revenge would be sweet, even if it was so small, but there is no need to disturb the past. I struggled with depression for many years after that, which ended up with a psychiatrist and a bunch of antidepressants.

There was once a HOC 3
That certain stolen design

 

The dying then lasted for four years. After Alesi, I said goodbye slowly to the editors, Peti, Máté, Gábor and finally Gabi, in chronological order. In the meantime, there were some outside news editors on the site, to whom I also owe a lot of thanks, especially for having some debt left to them due to my financial and privacy issues. Sorry for this!

I know a lot of things were left out of this story. The founding, Roadside and Yvorl, are many, many names I’ve been in contact with to this day, even if that connection is loose and Facebook, but it’s still a connection. If nothing else - I can thank the site anyway, the many friendships it has given, be it from readers or editors.

So this is the past, the longest section, let's see the present!

Jelen

So here we are today, which is amazing just because a few months ago, maybe half a year, it occurred to me to write a post like this that you’re reading now. Then, however, the idea of ​​writing would have been completely different. That entry would have been the farewell, the actual and final closure of the site. You know, it's hard to let go of your own child. He was born in my arms, cracked up, and then died. He died, but only almost because, thanks to my friend Chilly, he got a tip on a server where he could stay free and paid. However, this, although at first it seemed to be good, was not yet in a good condition. It wasn’t because I couldn’t let go. I watched, fiddled, updated the engine behind it, poked at the content, the many, many years of writing that rested there somewhere below the surface. Sometimes I optimized a bit, watched Google Web Master Tools, hunted for dead links. I was essentially sitting by the deathbed, holding my hand and not letting it die. I couldn't let go. Maybe I missed the past when he was still alive, maybe this kind of work was missing, maybe just writing. I don’t know what, but something sure was missing from my life.

Then all of a sudden, at the end of last year, something happened. A lady asked a home agency if I wouldn’t feel like trying out a monitor and writing an article about it. I said yes for some reason. Since then, I have been preparing to write a third such article. Then a few weeks later, I received an email from an old, foreign manufacturer contact. And the last push was that I was approached three weeks ago by a GearBest representative who also handles domestic relations and what God is doing, He also wanted to work with me. It was then that I felt that once again it might be worth running into this thing.

Future

The long past and the short present may be followed by the future. Imagine the following picture!

There was once a HOC 4

You stand on the porch of your houses one fall morning and look into the distance. It’s a little cool, the fog hasn’t picked up yet, the mist is penetrating under your clothes, you’re getting a little cold, but the mug of coffee in your hands, the feeling of freedom and the good air are still distracting you from the unpleasant feelings. You looked into the distance, you know that beyond the fog there is a beautiful green hill, there is a row of trees at the edge of the plowing, you know that the stream is running with a cheerful ripple at the bottom of the hill, but you see nothing of it. The fog covers the landscape, only at the end of the garden you can see the silhouette of the cherry tree, but still you know, you feel in your souls that the landscape is there, waiting for you, waiting for you to walk through the meadow again, across the small bridge over the stream, all the way arable along the forest. You would go, but something is still holding you back. Maybe it’s gout, a sore waist, a worn hip, or just a lack of courage? You stand for another minute or so, slowly looking back at the house, the warmth, but then you step forward one, then another, and you are already down in front of the porch. Have you left? Maybe yes, maybe no, but you’ve taken the first steps, and looking back over the past few years, that also seems like a big deal, far bigger than you might have thought a few months ago.

There was once a HOC 5
And this is the last site running on its own engine, even before Joomla

 

Well, somehow I feel that way, and I’m somewhere here now. There are no more companies that were behind the site, my companies have gone out of business. I have a job, not bad, I’m an administrator and I love doing it. By the way, I don't live out of this. That pretty much means I don’t have many choices, starvation isn’t an option, there’s no revenue from the site, so it stays a hobby for now if I don’t get tired of time ahead of it. I am attracted to the opportunity and I enjoy scribbling. It would be better if not 100-200 people read what I write, but many thousands a day than before, but I'm not fussy. Even so, it’s surprising that recently written monitor articles have been opened 2-3 thousand times, while I thought it would be good for 1-2 people to wander to the site here every day.

That's it, I'm here now. I cut back on the big adventure again, but I’m still in the first steps, somehow like we’re writing 2002 again. Of course, I have become older and more experienced 15 years since then. Crazy many and crazy long 15 years.

Finally, if anyone now feels that they are cutting into this adventure with me because of some irresistible desire, let me know. I don’t promise anything, I can’t promise anyone to make one of this again nagy it will be a small but thriving business as it is nothing more than an adventure. True, it is expected to be a good little adventure!

So if someone wants to try themselves, I stand in front of you, you can publish here, essentially casually, in a casual style, about what interests you. (I only wrote this last sentence out of habit, for the sake of order, I know from many years of experience that the dog will not show up. 🙂)

I remain your followers with sincere respect:

Zoltán Tárnok alias s3nki

About the Author

s3nki

Owner of the HOC.hu website. He is the author of hundreds of articles and thousands of news. In addition to various online interfaces, he has written for Chip Magazine and also for the PC Guru. For a time, he ran his own PC shop, working for years as a store manager, service manager, system administrator in addition to journalism.