Alexander m said:

Tyler, what is it that you are studying at the college, you have said that you work in the medical field so wouldn't that give you a good pay check. Any way If you were wondering what I was doing,  I was taking chemistry for a year at john abbott college but now I'm switching to dawson an entirely different program, no prizes guessing what Im taking this fall.              

You're correct. I work in the medical field. But I'm going back to college to learn PHP and SQL, among other web development topics. 

This website is built using stand alone software that was written in PHP, and it stores all the data (like the text and images of posts) in an SQL database. I knew enough to tweak things here and there, but for any complex modifications I was either stumped or too nervous to mess with things. 

As the site grew it took on a bit of a life of it's own. People began requesting functionality that didn't exist, so I had to start hard-coding different features into the site.

Then the site grew to the point that it got slow. It was getting between 2 and 3 thousand visits a day, but could only handle 300 visitors at a time (the limit set by my hosting account was 300 connections at once). So during the peak hours the site would slow to a crawl, and the 301+ visitors would see an error screen because the page wouldn't load for them.

I started getting complaints from users that the site wasn't as pleasant to visit (because they had to wait so long for pages to load). So I switched to a more expensive hosting plan, which helped a lot. But the site is still more sluggish than it should be.

It's also a bit clunky to use. People have trouble figuring out how to insert pictures, and when you log in it takes you to a "dashboard" that you have to figure out how to get out of before you can write a forum post. That's because I've pieced the site together from multiple technologies (Wordpress, the CMS, and SimplePress, the forum software). 

So I started getting bids on having the site completely re-written from the ground up with exactly the functionality it needed, no more – no less. The lowest bid was $10,000 and most of the bids (I got over 10 bids) were closer to $30-50k. I was shocked! My entire 4 year degree cost me less than $50k. So I told the developers to "stick it" and decided to go back to school to learn the stuff on my own. I was already self-taught to a level of proficiency. But proficient wasn't good enough to take the site to the next level. My hope is I'll be good enough after a few years at the local community college that I can modify or re-code the site myself. 

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I'm a fast typer, so I can lay it all out in minutes and I don't even realize how much I've written until it's on the page. 

As for chemistry, it's a good science to know. I was a chemistry major for my first year of college in 1997 (Chemistry and Biology). But I discovered quickly that college chemistry is completely different from High School chemistry. I found HS chem to be fun and interesting. But college chem was extremely boring and very theoretical. When I got to Organic Chemistry I took my first semester and dropped my major. I was miserable. I was getting A's and B's, but it wasn't fun for me at all. I kept my biology major and switched my chem major to history, which I was terrible at (I can't remember dates or causal relationships to save my soul). But I liked history. I found it interesting. And when I was tired from studying Bio I'd switch to history and it was like my brain had a second wind. It was my senior year before someone told me the theory of right-brain left-brain activities. Biology and chemistry use one side of the brain, while history uses the other (in theory). So when I was a Bio-Chem double major I was exhausted from all the studying. But when I became a Bio-Hist student I found that I could study as much as necessary without getting exhausted. 

I still suck at history. But it was a fun reprieve from the sciences. 

Anyway, I assume you're not taking up knitting (although there's nothing wrong with that). Might you be switching to machining? … 

That would be great! Yea, that forum section is a bit sparse …