About
About welshtroll (the person)
I am Kris (yes named after that one, he was popular in the 70's OK) and I have been going by the name Welshtroll since about 1998, which was when I permanently got access to the internet at home. Before then it was at other peoples houses and at college. As for the origin of the name it was likely sourced from a good foundation of mythical creatures and AD&D.
I am based in the UK, South Wales to be exact, where I live with my wife (FlyinPinkMunki) and our two sons, upgraded from one as part of the 2021 Surprise DLC Bundle.
I am a programmer by trade, my first job was as "new blood" brought into work on a aging CICS/COBOL financial mainframe system. I was a lot of fun and working within the confines of an older system required you to be far more creative and clever with how you approached development.
Once I moved onto working in C++ the scope of my work was a lot broader and varied ,it soon widened to include Visual Basic to support on premises applications being rolled out to desktops.
Now I still work in the financial sector and still technically focused, despite a title change or 5, a lot of what I do is still the same as when I started out in the industry, but then I'm much better at it. I excel at analysis and problem solving so very well placed in my role.
When I'm not working, I can be found playing some form of game, whether it be a Video game, Table top or Role Playing. Unlike many my first MMO wasn't Fantasy based but Sci-Fi, I got hooked on MMOFPS title PlanetSide in 2004, it was a good progression from playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault multiplayer, I was still on dial up when I first tried in the game in 2003, but had to wait for better internet pipes.
About welshtroll (the site)
I've been running a website named welshtroll.co.uk since 2000 when I made my first attempt at proper website design. Needless to say it was limited but I learnt a lot of skills while attempting to add that 105th GIF to my gallery page.
In 2003/2004 I decided to try my hand at PHP and slowly built up my website using that language to add custom features, running the website was as much a learning experience as it was a blog. Between then and the end of 2006, there were numerous versions of welshtroll, each better than the last.
In 2007 welshtroll.co.uk returned, slightly more polished and with some ideas to drag it up-todate with new and interesting technologies. In October 2008 I decided to move my blog over to the Wordpress software. So far, so good.
October 2022 - After my hosting plan was cancelled on my current provider I decided to look for a replacement, support was lacking and there were unexplained outages, there were promised migrations that never happened.
So after some comparison my website is now hosted by https://krystal.uk/ the largest independent hosting company in the UK, who aim to be honest and Open about their business, but also aren't looking to sell to one of the big monopolies that they set out to challenge.
Oh. If you are looking for new hosting and want to split a £20 referral fee (£10 each), enter WELSHTROLL at checkout, when you are placing an order for web hosting for the first time. (The discount only applies to hosting services, not domain names).