Ortamlar

By Mehmet Davut2004–2009

A social network I built alone from 2004, in plain PHP and MySQL, with AJAX pages that updated without reloading.

Ortamlar was a social network: member profiles, a portal, forums, a private mail system called Postane, news and photo galleries.

I started it in high school in 2004, under the code name BuddyCity, as a way to teach myself. When the ortamlar.com domain was registered, the project took that name. Before it reached a stable release I deleted it and wrote it again from scratch fifteen or sixteen times. It ran on plain PHP and MySQL, on Linux servers I rented myself.

What my friends remember is the AJAX. The term was coined in February 2005, and I was working with the technique that same year. Pages on Ortamlar updated without reloading, which none of them had seen a site do before.

In 2006, at university, I launched it with posters on the notice boards. Within a month or two, about six hundred people had signed up.

It was never meant to make money. In 2007 I wrote that I published it because some Turkish friendship sites charged for membership, because forum software was being imported from abroad when it did not need to be, and to show what young Turkish programmers could do.

I sold the ortamlar.com domain around 2009, so whatever lives at that address today is not mine. The Wayback Machine keeps the forum from February 2007, the homepage from September 2007 and January 2008, and my own page on the platform, published under the username davit.