About the site
The site originally started out as an idea brewing in my brain, kind of like an itch that refuses to go away until attended to. Therefore it was only inevitable that at some point, camportal had to be created.At this point, I had no real knowledge of programming with PHP, so had to use my limited knowledge to basically hop through the internet and locate pre-made portal software (seems I wasn't the first person with this idea) after locating some dirty PHP and MySQL based package, I got to installing it on my complexero.com web-space. Once up, I added myself and Oli_G to the users-list, and took a look at the site, I wasn't overly impressed, yet I advertised the new portal to friends on IRC, and managed to round up about six users in total.
I quickly grew tired of the nasty software I had installed (Unfortunately, I don't remember the name), so decided to delete it all and make my own portal. The original site was then born, and put onto a sub-domain of my main site, namely http://cam.speedyb.co.uk/.
Being a bit more impressed with this than the previous instalment, I decided to advertise the site a bit more on forums such as OSNN.net (Formerly NTFS.org) which drew in more people.
Just as with the original idea, another struck me, this time it was to make a site completely dedicated to the portal, and even buy it a domain... A few days later, I had decided on camportal.co.uk, and made the purchase. In about two or three days, I knocked up the wonderful orange site which you see before you now, and over time added more and more code into it for features such as automatic menu generation, render time statistics, random cams, all cams, and of course, I created "Box", which is the shout-box used for user comments on the site.
Accompanied with plenty of forum posts about the site, shameless plugs where I get the chance, being linked by the creator of Fwink and Google giving us the #1 spot when searching for "camportal" (at time of writing), the site has grown to what it is today, and continues to slowly expand.
Version 0.45 of the site saw many additions such as AJAX pages, forms and shoutbox, however now at v0.5, I have decided to ditch the needless javascript, and get the site back to basics as it should be. I will also be spending more time working on a fuller featured admin panel for the site making management of users easier.