Tweaktown

TweakTown® is dedicated to my late grandfather Val Grimm, who first introduced me to computers many moons ago. The website was officially named and launched to the public on the 15th of September 1999. Originally TweakTown was known as "Wilmot's Website" and serviced as my homepage (blog) with information about me and links to other websites. TweakTown has transformed into one of the biggest and most successful tech websites in the world, being accessed by many tens of thousands of readers every day.

We have been featured in many mainstream press magazines, newspapers and many high-profile websites such as Digg, Gizmodo, Engadget, Slashdot and Fark regularly, and even on television through CNN, The Screen Savers, and TechTV. Our content is syndicated to thousands of readers through our RSS feeds, as well as by Google News and others.

How did it all start? I had a pretty good understanding of getting better performance out of 56k dial-up modems. So, I decided to publish a modem "tweaking" (fine tuning or optimizing) guide for friends that were crawling along on slow 56k dial-up Internet connections. They needed that little extra speed boost in online games to improve their ping. In the way the Internet works best, the word quickly got around about how well the famous Modem Tweaking Guide improved performance, and Wilmot's Website eventually got bigger, at rapid speed, to the point where it adapted into a fully functional tech website, with talented editors dotted all over the world.

Wilmot's Website was hosted by my local ISP at the time. They eventually kicked me off their server for exceeding bandwidth limits. At this stage, I had also released a couple more tweaking guides for my growing audience. This was when I thought about starting up an optimization page and getting rid of the personal stuff, which probably wasn't of much interest to the general public. On the 15th of September 1999, I suddenly came up with the idea of renaming Wilmot's Website to "TweakTown."

In 2004, sometime after TweakTown turned into a full-time job for me, a company was registered in Australia named Tweak Town Pty Ltd.