Hi my name is Joël Thonar, welcome to athleblog.eu formerly called “Athleblog Community”. 

Athleblog Community was a platform that I created on top of my track & field team website “Guerrero Team” (name of my coach at that time). It was in April 2007 2 months after the birth of my first kid. 

I believe he gave me the inspiration to create this system where athletes, groups of athletes or even clubs could create their website and increase their visibility on Internet. Athleblog Community was available in 6 languages: French, English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and even Japanese. 

According to me track & field was not very well represented in sport media in Belgium, it was important for me to somehow mutualize technical resources where nothing really existed specifically for this sport. 

So I started a journey of 5 years; I developed alone 2 major versions of the application (classic ASP replaced by ASP.NET). Some relatives and friends helped me to translate interfaces and bring nearly 800 subscribed users and 130 created websites. Of course the actual usage was lower (somewhere around 100 active users for 20 active websites), but a great community mainly in France and Belgium raised which was very satisfying. I even earned a little money with advertising. 

The course unfortunately ended in September 2011 with the death of the hosting physical server. I was not prepared to handle such situation, it took me 2 long weeks to retrieve data and relaunch it somewhere else. You can imagine the consequences of such a huge outage. 

Today, the platform has been decommissioned and its content deleted. However a simplified and "cloudified" version of the engine still powers RIAAC website (my current track & field club) and this personal blog. It was a good exercise for me to use Microsoft Azure cloud components instead of hosting in a virtual machine. I recovered my archives just for the record, They are available for you to read, beware it is in French! 

About me 

So as I am the subject, let me present myself in few keyword: 1 girlfriend | 2 kids | Europe | Brussels | Enterprise architect | TOGAF | Solution architect | Microsoft Azure | Drones | Audi | video games. 

And my background: analyst developer | Microsoft .NET | track & field | athlete | coach for young athletes. 

Future blog posts might cover one of those subjects. 

Conclusion 

Athleblog is dead, long live Athleblog! For me it is the end of a great adventure and I would like to thank one more time all the people who participated to it. Even if this experience did not ended successfully I learned so much in many domains. It helped me in my “main” career and gave me eager to create other new stuffs. By the way I have another application in state “work in progress”, stay tuned! 

If you read everything until here, thank you! I invite you to share this post, comment it in your favorite social media and exchange few words if you want. 

Happy new year 2020 !! See you next time ++