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History

Intro

I believe in the ideal of the Internet being a repository of free information available to people around the world. During the 1990s, as I searched the Internet for information on taekwondo, what little information I found was very basic and was geared toward attracting people to individual martial arts schools or organizations. One website I recently visited said they did not put free information about their martial art on their site because of terrorism, saying that they did not want their deadly secrets to fall into the hands of terrorists. I assume they did not want terrorists to learn the "deadly secrets" of their art and go around killing innocent people using a “dead touch.”

I had been collecting books, articles, and papers on taekwondo for years and had acquired knowledge and experience from various instructors of taekwondo and other martial arts for decades. Therefore, in 1998, I had the first thoughts of designing and publishing a website that would contain useful, easy to understand information on all aspects of taekwondo presented in a way that was easy to navigate and read. I started by learning how to build a website. Then I designed it and start filling it with information.

History

2000

Finally, on January 1, 2000, I published "Taekwondo Tutor" ( the name was later shortened to TKDTutor) on the Internet as TKDTutor.com. In the years since, I have kept refining the design of the site and adding more and more information, and the number of visits has kept growing. Visitors made suggestions for new topics and new features and these suggestions were incorporated along the way.

2004

As the site got larger, new features were added, and the number of daily visits increased, I had to change web hosts, keep upgrading hosting features, and adding bandwidth, all of which increased the costs of maintaining the site. After resisting the concept for years, in October 2004, I added advertising links to the site to help defray costs.

2010

In February, a totally redesigned TKDTutor.com was brought online. The redesign made the site more aesthetically pleasing and gave it a consistent format throughout. Site page size was limited to about 500 words long; the size of a page in a standard book. Topic, subtopic, and page navigation were simplified and made easier to use. The redesign made the site compliant with standards-based Web design as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

2011

In January, I removed all images, sounds, and videos from the site. Current law gives the copyrighted owner of the copyrighted material the right to sue you if use it, even if it had no copyright notice, you received permission to use it from the presumed owner, or you purchased it from the presumed owner. Current law says if you use a copyrighted item, you are liable and you have no defense, even if the item was not copyrighted when you originally obtained it. There are businesses that make their money by copyrighting material or purchasing copyrights and then pursuing anyone one who uses digital media licensed by them. Therefore, I removed all images that I did not create myself, regardless of their origin and replaced them with free Microsoft clip art.

2013

In January, I converted the entire site to the Joomla content management system and totally redesigned the site. The redesign makes the site responsive to mobile devices, easier for visitors to use, and easier for me to maintain.

2014

In July, I removed Google ads from the site to make it easier to use.

In December, I converted the site to Joomla 3.0. The entire site was redesigned. The menu system was redesigned to make it easier to find information on the site when using any device.

2015

I converted the site from a page format to a header format. In the past, long articles were divided into pages to make reading easier. However, this meant that with each page change the new page had to be downloaded. With headers, long articles load once and are divided into sections using sliders as headers for each section. Readers may open and close headers as they wish to make reading easier.

2017

I’m getting too old to bother with fighting hackers trying to get into the site, constant upgrades to Joomla, and with dealing with a web host. So, I began converting the entire site to Google products.

This change will eliminate paying a web host and dealing with all their problems. I’ll let Google deal with hackers. I will have all the articles stored in Word format for any future use.

2020

After years of no so continuous work, the TKDTutor rebuild is now fully complete. New information will continue to be added regularly.


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