Beagle - 1:25 am on Jan 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

What someone considers to be a hobby would depend on the individual. My hobby site is about a subject I enjoy being involved in and enjoy writing about for a group of people who enjoy reading about it, and I keep everything else simple. When I have more time to spend on it, I spend more time on it. When I don't, I can say, "Sorry, I wanted to have that new page up by the end of the month but didn't quite make it." Everyone says, "Hey, no prob," and I get back to it when I have time. It costs about $4/month for hosting and as much time as I want to put into it. That's a hobby. If I felt obliged to spend every waking moment at it, or get into serious web development (which I don't enjoy nearly as much as creating the content) it would be something else.

For someone who has fun exploring the technical side of website development, they might even enjoy setting up automated database backup - seems strange to me, but everybody's different.

I'm sure that for a lot of professional web developers, a "hobby website" would be an oxymoron, which is completely understandable. Mine is an opportunity for me to publish what I enjoy, without having to worry about a professional appearance (I can even make mistakes), or keyword density, or the opinion of someone who's paying me. It probably also makes a difference that the subject of the hobby isn't a common one, so the only way to gather an appreciable number of people interested in it is on the web. If I were interested in something that just needed a local place to gather, the website very likely wouldn't exist.