My Dad and Snoring

My Father, ENT Surgeon Dr George Lewkovitz (26 connections on LinkedIn!) retired last month.

I visited his snoring website - https://snoring.com.au for the first time in a while. It looks like a complete dog's breakfast with lots of error pages.

There's a reason. The website was built nearly 20 years ago, in 1999 by his son, then tossing up between continuing a career in High-tech IT or Security (it ended up being both). 

This was a time when WYSIWYG web software was a dream and 'Web Designer' was not yet a job description. The pages were dictated by Dad to a secretary who sent it to me from WordPerfect (which added all sorts of formatting issues). It was then hand coded by me in a text editor, with the graphics prepared in everything from Microsoft Paint to a copy of Photoshop that came from 'somewhere' without a manual. You could not just download stock images. They were not yet 'a thing'.

The 'snoring discussion forum' (now broken) was some cobbled together Perl scripts which broke every time the web host was acquired by someone else. Despite all this, very quickly the site rose to the number one position for a search for snoring on a relatively new search engine called "Google". Twenty years later it's still on page 2. Not too shabby.

Over that period and the 'dot com bubble' companies were trying to monetise their online presence. Every website suddenly had 'Google Adsense' ads littered all over it making the site owners a few bucks. Meanwhile, Snoring.com.au, built in my bedroom, was bringing in 2-3 new private patients a week. They in turn helped pay for my university studies.

My work on the site (which sometimes included typing answers to 'frequently asked questions' on the forum on behalf of Dad, who couldn't (and still can't) type) made me something of an authority on certain snoring issues. It's interesting searching Google today that most of the top 'hits' are for products that have no medical benefit whatsoever. They are snake-oil and I'll bet it's a multi billion dollar industry. Once upon a time most of the info was fairly accurate and academic. Now? Well, fake news and all the rest...

The site will probably go dark soon (PM me if you'd like to make an offer for the domain). We also registered rhinoplasty.com.au which Dad has been meaning to finish for two decades. He was busy... In fairness, I probably should have updated the site once or twice in the last decade but I've been busy too.

If snoring keeps you up at night and you need a good ENT Surgeon, I highly recommend my Father. Good luck getting an appointment though..

If security and risk keeps you up at night, my Dad would be happy for you to give me a call instead. 1300 300 24 7.