I created the domain classwords.com in 2003 so I could use it as a high school English teacher. It became a highly developed and interactive site with my students. The interface I used was mostly HTML, Php, and Mysql. Students could compose and submit all their written work here, share it with the class, receive comments, complete worksheets and quizzes, view their grades, vote on things, etc. Since I started with only a very rudimentary knowledge of HTML, it was a big project and took a while to shape into usable form, but by the 2005 school year most of the features were functioning and I was using it regularly with all my classes.

This worked out well, because a few years later my classroom was moved to a computer lab, so the site was used every day and also became more extensive and sophisticated. Since I was mostly concerned with speed, usability, functionality, and mostly focused on text, there was nothing fancy about its appearance, but it worked well for a lot of things, and students didn't seem to mind or have problems using it. At the time, there was little available along the lines of Google Classroom, so classwords.com may have been a little ahead of the times on some things, but I never troubled to develop a user friendly interface for managing it. Mostly I just used BBEdit, Transmit, Sequel Pro, and services available from the host server. I continued to use and develop it until I retired in 2015, but by then there were services available from the District that could do the same things, usually better since they were professionally developed. After I retired, the site went dormant until 2020.

I started using social media more and was having a hard time finding a suitable place for longer or bigger things that I created so I could just post links to them when the whole thing didn't fit very well on Twitter or Facebook. It seemed like a good thing to resurrect classwords.com for, so here we are. I've completely disabled all the old versions of the site and started out fresh, so it has a new purpose, a new look, and new content. Since most of it will be linked through social media, there isn't a great need to make it interactive at this time, and it's much easier to manage without messing with Php and Mysql. It's hard enough remembering all the HTML stuff, and I need to do more with CSS than I have previously. We'll see where it goes from here.

Back when I started this, coming up a domain name was a challenge, especially since so many are taken. I liked that this one sounded a little like "crosswords," but also had multiple connotations like "classes about words,"classes of words," and "words with class." In the current incarnation, I think "Class Words" is the proper emphasis.