What is 'Your Birthday Database' ?

This web site is a tool I started developing to learn about PHP. At the end, it seems that the result is good, is an easy to use tool and works correctly, so I have decided to keep it open for anyone who wants to subscribe.

By creating an account in this tool, you have access to a personal database in which you can keep the dates for the birthdays you want to remember. The database will send you an email as a reminder for those birthdays depending on your profile selections. This service is free and for the moment I'm not thinking on introducing any ads in the web site or in the emails.

Basically this is something I have done simply for fun and that I offer to whoever wants to use it. I don't have any interest in collecting information from the users, and I will not try to make any money selling that information. However I cannot guarantee 100% confidentiality for that data because this page and database is hosted in a server shared with more people, and I have no control of that server. If you are worried about the information you need to enter to subscribe, or the data you save for your birthday entries, this is not the tool you are looking for.

For this reason, I cannot guarantee that the reminders for your birthday entries will be always delivered as you indicate in your profile. This doesn't mean that you cannot send me an email complaining about the service: Please do so to work on avoiding it happens again. Just a note: The service has been working correctly since it started in 2003.

If you subscribe to this tool, you are responsible for the information you introduce and the use you make of this tool.

Who am I ?

My name is Fertxo, I was born in Azagra and I currently live in Brussels,

I'm a Telecommunication Engineer and I work for Cisco Systems since 1999, just in time for the Y2K :-) I'm Customer Support Engineer specialist in Cisco Router's Software and Hardware Architecture. If you know what it is, and you are interested, my CCIE number is 7610 (in Routing & Switching)

Besides working a few hours per day for my employer, I have some hobbies that are considered a bit weird by normal people. One day I thought that I should be able to build a Web tool and decided to start learning about PHP. I had the idea of the Birthday Database and I thought that while learning, the tool could end up being kind of useful to remember that dates I always forget.

I don't want you to think I'm a complete geek... I also enjoy reading, watching a movie, listening to music, going out, going out, going out :), traveling, discussing everything, sharing something... You know, those kind of thinks people who doesn't want to know about PHP enjoy doing.

Anyway, the reason to tell you about this is that I want you to know that I'm not a weird person with hidden purposes to collect information and make money selling it...

What will happen to this page?

I would like that in a couple of months, the number of users subscribed to 'Your Birthday Database' is higher than 5000. I suppose that at that point, the administrator of employees.org would detect that this tool is consuming some resources of the server and would let me know that may be it's time to move it somewhere else. Normally this somewhere else is a paying server, and therefore I would introduce some ads to make some money for that.

As the service would still be good and for free, the happy users wouldn't mind those non intrusive ads and would even click on them to help with the site maintenance.

I know that it will happen just in my dreams, but in the mean time this tool will continue online while the hosting in employees.org doesn't represent a cost or a problem.

If at some point, God forbid, I have to close this site, I will communicate it to all users as soon as I know about it and I will send the information in the database to each user in a understandable format, so that this information is not lost.

The point I want to make is that this is an amateur tool, and I want that it's known by the person who is subscribing. If the day we have the critical mass to move to another type of hosting arrives, then the conditions would change into something more professional. But that is not something I have though about yet...

Anyway, I keep on learning and I will add more functionality to this tool. Also, if you have any suggestion, please do not hesitate to send me a line with it...